If you’re reading this, you already know the current car market, new and used, is busted. There are no good deals, no hidden gems, no smart buys. Everything is roundly terrible. But it’s especially in times like these that we must be vigilant and keep our heads cool. Which is exactly what doesn’t happen on Bring a Trailer every single day.
That brings us to this 14,000-mile 2004 Hummer H2, which just sold on the auction site for $58,200 after 43 bids. It is a very clean example of a very bad vehicle, the poster child of style over substance. But even its style didn’t last, as gas prices ballooned in the late-aughts and General Motors couldn’t give the damn things away. Nor the Hummer brand, for that matter.
What was millennial trash, though, is now treasure. The sticker price on this particular accident-free, one-owner example, a truck loaded with such bygone luxuries as a six-disc CD changer and a built-in navigation system, was $57,800 when new. It’s just gone for $400 over sticker — not accounting for inflation, of course — 17 years later.
I’ll admit I have no experience with the H2, because the vast majority of these things vanished when the housing bubble did. My colleague Lawrence, who worked at a GMC dealer before gracing these very pages, drove one for two hours that had been traded in by a customer. “I’d wager that if I had to make an emergency maneuver it would’ve flipped easily,” Lawrence said. “It felt unsettled.”
He’s not the only one. Our old pal Doug DeMuro tested an H2 years back and noted an “immense amount of body roll,” along with a ride that was strangely harsh for no good reason. And William Clavey, who reviewed one humbly provided to him by a Jalopnik reader in 2017, found little positive to say about the defunct SUV, save for favorable approach and departure angles:
The four-speed automatic downshifts only when it wants to. And the entire truck handles like it just downed a two-four of Molson Canadians.
And that’s before we’ve addressed the sea of rattly, shit plastics, the fact every vaguely functional-looking piece of furniture on the exterior in fact wasn’t, and the grim reality that sets in when you realize the the big six-liter LS V8 under the hood, with its 316 horsepower and 360 lb-ft of torque, doesn’t move the clumsy beast with any sense of urgency in exchange for its total lack of fuel economy.
Oh — and those sidesteps spoiled the ground clearance, anyway.
There’s a part of me that can understand taking a punt on a pristine specimen of a vehicle that stands as a time capsule to a strange and generally terrible time for the American auto industry. This is like five punts though. The H2 wasn’t worth its self-ascribed value then and neither age nor nostalgia changes that, regardless of what the deep-pocketed BaT crowd is willing to pay. Y’all need to get a grip. Or don’t, I guess — it’s your money.