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Comment by el_nahual | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't buy one because they are such profoundly antisocial vehicles. Size, mass, and racecar like acceleration do not exist in a vacuum. They destroy pavement, they are dangerous to basically everyone around, difficult to control, and also incredibly loud at highway speeds.

They are not vehicles intended for living in a community, and it's a travesty that the government has not put regulation in place meant to protect those outside the vehicle.

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Just curious, what makes them particularly loud at highway speeds? And are they louder than similarly sized / weight ICE trucks?

Judge for yourself: https://youtu.be/gulh7AxESyA?t=103

fwiw that's a vehicle with a modified exhaust (and not a particularly fast one to begin with)

So that's a truck EV... that has a Hemi V8 in it? I can see why you'd expect one to be loud.

(Jokes aside, most ICE trucks are not loud on the highway, unlike this one with a modified exhaust being demonstrated with wide open throttle.)

probably similar to a dually heavy duty truck. the sources of the sound is the enormous tires hitting the pavement with that much weight behind it

At highway speeds, tire and wind noise dominate over engine noise, even for ICE cars. That "roaring" sound you hear emanate from a highway is actually due to those two factors.

Tire noise in particular is affected by vehicle weight (I suspect--don't quote me--as a square of the weight). EVs are MUCH heavier that comparable ICE cars. The hummer EV weighs 9,000 lb (!). So they are extremely loud at highway speeds.

There aren't similarly sized/weight ICE trucks, the similar trucks are lighter because gasoline is more energy-dense than lithium ion batteries.

The H2 (the big 3-row one) weighs 6,400 lbs. The H3 (the 'small' 2-row version with seating for just under 5 adults) weighs 4,600 lbs. The HEV (ostensibly "Hummer Electric Vehicle", but obviously pronounced "Heavy") weighs 9,400 lbs and only seats 5.

All three are absurd tools to select for transporting a 160 lbs human between point A and point B.

If you change the numbers from 160lbs to 300lbs and 9,400lbs to 2,000lbs does it really seem any less absurd if you're looking at it strictly from a numbers point of view?

Yes? It's a factor of 6.6 instead of a factor of almost 60.

I can understand engineering constraints that say a vehicle with an energy source and controls and comfort and so on requires some multiplier that might not be less than 1, but 58x is a lot.

A 2000 pound theoretical car is 60x more weight than a bike that can also carry you. Looking strictly at numbers, a car doesn't make sense to transport a person in most cases. I'm not advocating for less cars, just that looking at it as a weight to payload issue doesn't make sense to begin with.

I don’t know about Hummers in particular, but most modern trucks are very quiet at highway speeds, at least with highway tires. My RAM 1500 is quieter inside on the highway than my BMW 3 series or my Ford Escape or any Tesla I’ve driven. The V8 engine is also quieter at idle and at highway speeds than either of those aforementioned cars. My very topical truck handles pretty decently too (for its size at least).

Are you sure that's not due to better sound proofing of the cabin? I'm referring to the noise outside the vehicle.

As for handling:

The hummer EV has a 0 - 65mph time of 1.4 seconds...and a stopping distance from 70mph of 200 feet.

That means if a person were to step on the gas for a second and a half, and a pedestrian happened to be crossing the street 80 yards away, that person would be dead.

Outside the vehicle, the engine and tires are pretty quiet too, not much different from any other car.

As for hummer level acceleration, I agree that’s unnecessary and would be dangerous to use in an urban area. 0-65 mph in 1.4 seconds sounds wrong though, it’s more like 4 seconds. Car and Driver measured 3.3 seconds for 0-60 excluding rollout time. Accelerating full blast in such a fast car in an urban area would be reckless on the driver’s part, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drive it safely and reasonably in urban areas.

The Hummer’s bad stopping distance is from a combination of heavy weight an off-road focused tires not optimized for dry pavement grip. With that said, its stopping distance is only around 15% worse than the average car.

As an example of stopping distances and cornering grip of a more typical pickup like my RAM 1500, on stock tires, it’s 187 ft from 70 mph, and cornering grip is 0.78 G. For comparison, a Toyota Corolla has a 174 ft stopping distance and 0.82 G grip on stock tires, so around 5% better but not drastically better than the RAM truck.

Nothing is quiet at highway speeds in my experience, you just can't hear it inside the vehicle.

True, all vehicles (ICE or EV) are fairly noisy at highway speeds outside, though a pickup truck with highway tires isn’t much noisier than say Corolla or a Nissan Leaf moving at the same speed. Off road tires, particularly mud terrain tires, can get noisy though, as those tires were optimized for grip in mud rather than noise or highway fuel efficiency.

At this point if it keeps someone from buying another fossil fuel car, I'm fine with it.

TBH a 10,000 lb Hummer is probably worse for the environment than some luxury cars. The upfront carbon cost for manufacturing the thing will be enormous because its so big.

Maybe its better than an F-250...

Few people are probably cross shopping a Hummer EV and a luxury sedan.

Yeah, I guess they are mostly full sized pickup buyers?

Maybe full sized SUV. But even a 5000lb Ranger Raptor is probably not a competitior.

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