Interested in purchasing an electric GMC Hummer? I hope you have a quarter of a million dollars handy — or a lot of patience. Or both.
Because, while the list price set by GMC for one such vehicle was a mere $112,595, the free market says it’s worth twice that.
Maybe it’s because this particular vehicle was only the fifth to roll off the production line, and the buyer saw it as a collector’s item. (He’s probably right about that.) Maybe the vehicle’s near-mint condition, with only 80 miles on the odometer, contributed to the price. Maybe there were other factors at play that we don’t know about.
Whatever the reason, the 2022 vehicle sold for $225,500 at auction on Saturday, going for just over twice its original asking price.
As Fox News reported in May, the GMC Hummer EV Edition 1 pickup has been selling at prices that have nothing to do with its MSRP — but that’s how the free market works. When demand outstrips supply, prices rise. Sometimes they rise dramatically.
According to Fox, GMC had about 70 orders for every one electric Hummer it planned to manufacture this year — and that was back in May.
Anyone who has purchased — or tried to purchase — a new or used vehicle in the past 18 months or so knows that supply chain issues have made automobiles, electric or otherwise, scarce. The market is only now returning to something like normal.
That might even be true for electric Hummers, Insider theorized this week.
But with a wait list of 77,000 would-be purchasers and GMC’s reported manufacturing capacity of 12 vehicles a day, according to The Wall Street Journal, getting that market back to equilibrium is going to take some time.
Meanwhile, if you are one of the lucky few to get your hands on one of the most-in-demand new vehicles in decades, you need to be ready for the maintenance costs — at least once the vehicle is outside its warranty.
For example, you’d need to be prepared to shell out as much as $8,000 just to replace a set of taillights on the vehicle, as The Western Journal recently reported.
According to Car and Driver, that could be the cost — depending on local taxes and the prevailing labor rates where you live — to replace the taillights on the new GMC Hummer EV SUT.
And if you find the wait list for the Hummer daunting and choose to go with a Ford F-150 Lighting EV instead, I’d suggest you start praying right now that you’ll never have to replace the battery.
There are two possible batteries for the Lightning: the standard, designed to give the driver about 230 miles of range, and the extended range version, which increases that to about 300 miles, Tim Esterdahl of “Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk” said in a video posted to YouTube on Sunday.
Esterdahl is clearly the kind of guy who wants to get the bad news out of the way first, as he showed a screen shot of the price for the extended range battery to start.
It was $35,960.
That’s not a typo; the decimal point is in the right place. If your first thought was, “That’s more than I paid for my whole car!” you’re not alone.
Esterdahl said that was for the battery only, though he estimated that labor to install it would be “fairly inexpensive.”
If that seems high, you could always opt for the standard range battery for a mere $28,556.47. (Do you suppose the 47 cents would be a deal breaker? Like if you told the dealership, “I’ll pay $28,556 for this battery, and not a penny more!”, they’d let you walk away?)
Or, unless you’re a collector, you could do what wisdom dictates in such cases — make do with something else until the supply and demand for EVs equalizes. The same free market principles that are driving these prices skyward today are likely to pull them back down to earth eventually.
So unless you have a quarter of a million dollars handy, investing a little patience into the process is definitely the way to go for now. The market will correct itself in the end.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
