I didn’t realize exactly what an H2 was. From The Hummer Lives:
Hummer’s odyssey as a consumer brand starts, as many know, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously adopted a civilian version of the military-grade Humvee troop vehicle, now sold as the Hummer H1. Intrigued by the mojo created by the combination of the Terminator and the Humvee’s ultra-tough military look, GM bought the rights to the Hummer consumer brand. In 2002, Hummer launched the H2, which was basically a Chevy Tahoe in a chrome-trimmed Hummer suit. Early advertising for the H2 played up the hulking vehicle’s intimidation factor, and the H2 became a cultural icon in the post-9/11 world.But icon status can boomerang. As H2 sales boomed past GM’s internal expectations during 2003, the H2 became a fat target for environmentalists and other social critics who saw the big truck as an emblem of Detroit’s cockeyed priorities. Here, after all, was a ‘family’ vehicle so big that it was classified as a medium-duty commercial truck, and thus exempt from reporting estimated fuel economy on its window sticker. (That so many H2 buyers subsequently complained to market researchers at J.D. Power and Associates about poor fuel economy is one of those bits of data that keep alive P.T. Barnum’s line about the frequency at which suckers are born.)
Then, as gasoline prices started to rise last year, H2 demand began to fall. Fortunately for GM, the company had already been working on a new, smaller Hummer, called the H3. Derived from the underpinnings of the Chevrolet Colorado pickup, the H3 had an unusual in-line, five-cylinder engine that even in the 5,850-pound SUV was rated at 16 miles-per-gallon city, 19 highway (with automatic transmission).