Automotive Blog

The civilian Hummer didn’t reach the market until 1992, but the military version can trace its history back to the 1970s. In the 1970s, the United States Army began searching for an alternative to the militarized civilian trucks traditionally used by the army and in 1979 the U.S. Army drafted final specification for this new vehicle. What the army was looking for was a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle – HMMWV for short. A subsidiary of American Motors Corporation named AM General started with preliminary design work that same year and the first prototype was ready for testing within a year. The abbreviation HMMWV soon developed into a more tongue-friendly name by the addition of a few vocals in everyday speech and the vehicle accordingly earned the nickname “Humvee”. Calling it a military hummer is therefore strictly speaking not correct, it is a military HMMWV or Humvee. The name Hummer is only used for the civilian version of the Humvee, which was put on the market AM General in 1992. AM general has pondered the idea of creating a civilian version of the popular Humvee since the 1980s, and in 1990 they let tow white Hummers take a much publicised trip from London to Beijing. When the public realised how well this civilian version of the Humvee handled the rough roads of central Russia, a lot of 4W aficionados decided to get their very own Hummer. The Hummer sales were boasted even farther by the participation of Humvee’s in Operation: Desert Storm in 1991.