This 2025 GMC Hummer EV Pickup is a real life Tonka toy for big boys with big bucks. I was really looking forward to connecting with my inner idiot and having a Hellcat-like laugh, but very sadly, I found myself laughing at it a lot more than laughing with it. The whole thing just feels completely out of touch; a worst of both worlds between a legitimate Humvee and a modern EV.
…is the introduction I had drafted earlier in the week. The plan was to park it while I was out of town sampling the new Kicks, shoot the photos as soon as I got back, and return it early. The turn-around point, where the Hummer EV finally pierced through my jaded defences and infiltrated my inner idiot was when I positioned it for the lead photo a little further up. It was the classic front-three-quarter shot with the front wheels cranked.
Four-wheel steering is not all that novel anymore. Lots of vehicles have it. The difference with most vehicles is that when you put them in park, or when they put themselves in park after you’ve stepped out, the rear wheels automatically straighten out, for the sake of sensibility or something along those lines. The Hummer does not understand this concept. The Hummer exists to be siiick, bro, and it’s more than happy to flaunt it every chance it gets. So when I stepped out, walked away, and trained my camera on it, I saw the cranked-over rear wheels stay in position. I couldn’t help but laugh and say out loud to no one: “Siiick.”
And just like that, I started enjoying the Hummer. I always thought it looked cool, but I never really stopped to appreciate exactly how cool it was until I pointed a camera at it. I should have done this much earlier. I could have enjoyed the whole week with it. This SUT configuration, with a five-foot pickup truck bed, is without a doubt the way to go. Sure, the SUV probably makes more sense, but who cares? Nothing about this makes sense! The truck body looks sick and the rear window slides down, which is pretty sick.
If you’ve gone to the trouble of removing and neatly arranging the four removable “Infinity Roof” panels so they fit in the frunk, the Hummer’s reason for being starts making a lot more sense. With the panels in place, the narrow windshield has the strange effect of making a very large vehicle feel a teensy bit claustrophobic. Rip the roof off and you have one of the very few convertible trucks on the market. This makes the whole experience of piloting the damn thing feel as sick as it should be—and that sliding back window cuts turbulence way down.
The interior is not so nice. This was a major sticking point with me originally, but I’ve softened on its materials. It does not in any way feel like a cabin you’d expect from a nearly $160,000 vehicle. You can see GMC made some attempts to spruce up the space, like using faux brass accents everywhere. There’s also some sensibility in the choice to use a textured vinyl that feels more like 200-grit sandpaper for every soft surface. While it isn’t exactly luxurious, it’s tough and you won’t feel bad about getting it wet.
To be clear, I don’t mean to harp on it for being $160,000. There’s a crazy amount of vehicle here, both literally and figuratively. It weighs 10,000 pounds—an entire BMW Z4 heavier than the last F-150 we tested. The battery alone almost weighs as much as a Corolla in rare earth metals, and at 205 kWh, it has more than double the capacity of a typical EV. The copper in the three electric motors that produce 1,000 horsepower all-in isn’t nothing, either.
If anything, my biggest gripe with the cabin is that they tried to control the budget, instead of going further and leaning into the fact that it’s a freak of nature. Your typical EV buyer who’s excited to not buy gas anymore isn’t looking at one of these. An Alpha package, calling back to the original Hummer while adding some extra opulence, would be very welcome. There’s a couple detail misses, too. The button to lower the rear window is hidden in an overhead panel and quite a stretch to reach, and the over-the-top animations for its many modes and functions can be sluggish at times, like playing a game on a PC that can’t quite handle it.
Those functions aren’t exactly intuitive, either. One-pedal driving is buried in the settings menu, only accessible from swiping three pages over in the home screen. It also briefly pops up when you switch drive modes, but it’s easy to miss. It feels clumsy to switch to another drive mode, only to switch back immediately, just to quickly enable or disable one-pedal driving.
The extremely Team America Watts-to-Freedom launch mode is also completely hidden. I never would’ve found it without Googling it—when stopped, press the traction-off button twice. It then needs a good 15 seconds to cycle through its startup animation and lower the suspension, before allowing you to do a four-wheel peel and slingshot into the distance at a rate that’s absurd.
Lastly, there’s the Hummer signature pony-trick, the Crabwalk. It uses its four-wheel steering to turn all four wheels in the same direction, so it scoots side-to-side while pointing straight ahead. It’s surreal to see in action. They’ve even been pretty clever about it; for the first couple turns of the steering wheel, all wheels are linear. After that, only the fronts keep turning, so you can adjust your axis and turn.
Triggering it is annoying; it requires pressing and holding the left side of the drive-mode-select wheel and waiting for it to cycle through an obnoxious animation complete with sound effects, but it didn’t stop me from using it to finagle this brick into my tight parking confines at home. It’s one of those things that seems like it has no use, until you start inventing uses for them and cackling like a madman the entire time. Using Crabwalk to squeeze into a tight parking spot is much like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant.
Once you’re out of the parking lot, the Hummer EV actually drives pretty okay. Cumbersome for sure. It’s about the width of a lane of traffic, so your margin of error for keeping it in the lines is pretty small, and it doesn’t exactly handle like a scalpel. If you get tired of it, you can lean on the lane-tracing assist to keep you centered and Super Cruise to do just about everything for you once you’re on the highway.
You have to adjust expectations here. Of course the Hummer EV handles like a bus, but given that it’s about the size of a bus, it actually handles pretty well especially with the aggressive four-wheel steering. The wind noise is barely acceptable, but not bad for something shaped like a brick. The road noise from the 35-inch Goodyear Wrangler tires would be unacceptable, were it not for the fact that anything else wearing this sort of rolling stock will be inherently loud. This is what you signed up for.
To the Hummer’s credit, its trick air suspension that allows it to raise and lower on-demand does a phenomenal job of making this lummox ride like a Denali, despite being saddled with gigantic tires and an extra Corolla to carry around. Power delivery feels very natural when you’re driving normally, and feels very unnaturally monstrous—in a good way—when you’re hustling. Once you get over how quick the Hummer EV is relative to its size, and how much it squats under power—it feels like a plane taking off—it’s actually not as unwieldy as some other EVs I’ve driven.
The original Hummer was, like every military vehicle adapted for road use as a niche consumer product, kind of atrocious. They were exceptionally poorly furnished, hopelessly impractical, hideously expensive, and drove about as well as you’d expect from a five-ton farm truck with no power and no consideration for comfort, refinement, performance, or anything else we tend to like in niche vehicles. Unlike nearly all other military-descended vehicles on the market, it didn’t fit anywhere, either.
But none of that mattered because it was ridiculously cool. All of its cool factor came from a place of legitimacy that made it even cooler. This Hummer is dumb. To the wrong person, or even the right person in the wrong mood, it’s a cynical series of gimmicks. It’s as if the engineers are laughing at me as much as I’m laughing at and/or with the truck. It’s almost a satire of a modern truck, which themselves have grown so huge as to be a parody on their own. It’s a real-life Canyonero from The Simpsons, dressed in Team America: World Police garb.
But I know the words to the Canyonero jingle off by heart, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone do satire better than anybody. The 2025 GMC Hummer EV Pickup is, without a doubt, the stupidest, most ridiculous, obnoxious, and absurd vehicle I’ve ever driven. I genuinely wonder if it’s intended to be a parody of a modern truck, because every detail seems like they consulted a comedy writer first. Either way, I spent my whole time with it in stitches, and if you can’t laugh at a good satire, then the joke is on you.
