I simply spent every week driving the GMC Hummer EV, a ridiculously fast and astoundingly big car that’s nerve-wracking to pilot on the cramped and crowded streets of NYC. The brand new electrical Hummer is genuinely spectacular, and I’ll have extra to say on it in a future article, however for now I need to discuss one thing I discovered buried deep in a sub-menu on the dashboard touchscreen: An icon that reveals a Hummer EV driving over a Tesla Cybertruck, labeled VPRWR. Vaporware, get it? Very cheeky, GMC.
See, like a number of trendy off-road automobiles, the Hummer has a bunch of auxiliary switches put in from the manufacturing facility to regulate aftermarket stuff you may set up in your rig: Off-road lights, winches, tire pumps, stuff like that. However whereas most automakers obtain this with a row of bodily rocker switches, the Hummer’s aux switches are configurable touchscreen buttons accessed by way of the Off Highway web page on the infotainment display screen.
You possibly can configure every button with a label you sort in and an icon chosen from an entire plethora of choices. The icons vary from sensible and predictable — CB radios, air horns, lights — to downright goofy. Fancy a Frankenstein’s monster to regulate your trailer lights? Maybe a classic NASA spacecraft to your radar detector? GMC has you lined.
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It’s there, on the very backside of the button icon palette, that we discover this cartoon of a Hummer EV clamoring up the windshield of one thing that actually resembles a Tesla Cybertruck.
The squashed Cybertruck is one of some icons that appear to poke enjoyable on the Hummer’s opponents. You can too select clipart of a meteor about to strike a dinosaur (hiya, Ram TRX), or a Bigfoot-lookin’ character on the trot (gotcha, Ford Bronco Sasquatch package deal). Bear in mind, it is a car with a launch mode that’s formally named “Watts To Freedom”. Coming from the historically strait-laced Basic Motors, that is an completely buckwild quantity of goofin’. I like it.
Now, I’ve no manner of understanding whether or not the VPRWR button on this explicit Hummer was configured that manner by a GM worker, or by a fellow automotive journalist who’d borrowed the car earlier than me. Autos in an automaker’s media fleet get handed round to a bunch of various of us, and automobile reviewers typically poke round in probably the most distant sub-menus that don’t get touched by common drivers.
Whoever arrange the VPRWR button acquired a chuckle out of me. If the Cybertruck ever really escapes the vaporware curse and goes into manufacturing, I gained’t be shocked if it has some form of Easter egg in its touchscreen with a return-fire zing on the Hummer. Perhaps it’ll be subsequent to the fart button.