GM says the first three months of 2023 are “off to a great start” — but you can’t really say that about the GMC Hummer EV.
It’s officially April 3, so this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. In fact, General Motors announced its official sales numbers on Monday, charting significant growth across all four of its brands from the first quarter of 2022. But while many GM models are up significantly — Chevrolet’s electric Bolt increased by 5,400% now that it’s sorted out battery issues that annihilated sales last year — others are decidedly…not so good. Take the GMC Hummer EV as an example: Just 2 made their way to customers so far in 2023.
Not 200, not 2,000…2. There is some important context to consider here. Namely, the GMC Hummer EV and Brightdrop Zevo 600 van were both under stop-sale for improperly sealed battery packs from late October 2022 onward. However, that only affected 735 GMC Hummer EV trucks built between November 2021 and September 2022. Even going by what GM told the NHTSA, only 1% of that population actually had any issue, even if they were technically under recall.
The point is that GM has been fixing that issue over the past several months, and it’s rolling out a fix for new production. So, what’s going on? After all, GMC dealers shifted 99 Hummer EVs in the first quarter last year.
UPDATE 4/3/23: After a request for comment, here’s what a GM spokesperson told us today: “You are correct, we were under a recall/stop-delivery and we halted production to fix it. Production resumed on January 30 of this year and shipments resumed right the end of Q1. Q2 sales report will show deliveries of both the HUMMER EV Pickup and SUV.”
Interestingly, GM also announced today that the first 500 BrightDrop Zevo 600s have started shipping from the production facility in Ontario, Canada.
Certainly a strange number among today’s available sales reports, though there is always some lag behind any production reboot. That said, the GMC Hummer EV isn’t GM’s only EV to watch this year. The Cadillac Lyriq, for its part, shipped 968 examples to customers in the first three months of 2023. While we are talking about a luxury brand here, that’s still a relatively slow rollout, at least when you look at it against the (admittedly well established) Chevy Bolt’s 19,700 units.
