Things that make you go Hmmm Hummer

Ran into this blog and this post with a wonderful bit of sleuthing:

Hummer Overfloweth
The word around town was that the Hummers weren't moving. It looked like high gas prices and a White House reversal on fuel conservation meant that fewer "W" bumper stickers would find their exposed sticky sides mating gloriously with the smooth rear bumper of an H2, somewhere between the tow loop and the access hole for a Class 3 hitch.

We were skeptical at first. Sources can be unreliable, but the scuttlebutt was that inventory had been building for months now and the local Hummer dealer had panicked. He had begun storing his Hummer inventory at an undisclosed location, far from the dealer showroom so as not to spook jittery, prospective buyers with the mounting number of unsold H2s and H3s.

When an anonymous caller phoned in with the location, we were off. "The rear parking lot of the Hyatt Westlake Plaza Hotel", he said, just before the line went dead.

Here is what they found: About 150 H3's and eight or ten original H1's But there were no H2's -- from the post:

Someone from the dealership pulled in with another H3, so we wandered over and asked how business was these days. He said something about hurricanes and gas prices, then we asked where the H2s were. He said, "They're at the other lot".

Hmmm...

Thrilled and amused as we were, we'd only learned part of the story. After getting directions we proceeded to lot #2, while placing a few quick bets with an over/under quickly set at 60. The thinking here was that the despite looking like a Jeep Cherokee on steroids, the H3s were about $20K less expensive than the H2s and had respectable fuel economy (16 city / 19 highway is what the sticker said) - maybe the dealer had just placed a very large, poorly timed order, a few months back.

Surely the H2 inventory was under control.

Pulling into lot #2, the "under" looked liked it would be the clear winner - forty, fifty tops, from the first looks of it.

They found about 150 H2's in the other lot. Of course, General Motors is responding intelligently to this development. From Yahoo/Reuters:

GM to boost Hummer 3, truck output
General Motors Corp. on Thursday said it will invest about $20 million in its Shreveport, Louisiana, truck assembly plant to increase production of the Hummer H3 sport utility vehicle and Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon mid-size pickups.

The plant will add a third production shift to its paint shop in the first quarter of 2006 to prepare for increased production, the world's largest automaker said.