GMC Hummer Wins With Bold, Brash Aesthetic; Pleasing User Experience

Dec 01, 2023

Christie Schweinsberg | May 31, 2023

With an overall length of 18 ft. (5 m) and width of more than 7 ft. (2 m), the GMC Hummer pickup truck is literally one of the biggest winners yet of a Wards 10 Best Interiors and UX trophy.

But all that real estate is put to good use by General Motors’ interior designers and user-experience engineers, who crafted for this big off-roader a wholly unique and thoroughly modern cabin that gives the battery-electric vehicle just as much big, bold and brash personality inside as out.

"The Hummer does a service for everyone by showing battery-electric vehicles can be anything you want them to be and are not just for environmentalists," says judge Drew Winter.

Open the vehicle and a lighting sequence starts, eventually illuminating the word "Hummer" on the grille. When charging, the slots on the grille fill up like a fuel gauge in a cluster display, making it easy to tell the battery's state of charge from a distance.

Climb inside and a movie of the vehicle traversing rocky terrain plays up its off-road capability, with floor mats and speaker grates that have a "muddy puddle design" doing the same.

Every surface is carefully considered, with many unique textures and finishes on display.

The word "Hummer" appears almost everywhere you look: doors, seats, dash.

Doors and seat edges wear a distinctive rubberized type of fabric that has a tiny check pattern. Also uniquely textured are vents and pillar grips, as are the center stack and console's switchgear of buttons and dials.

Some metallic trim in the vehicle wears a warm and unique mocha color.

The Hummer's displays and virtual controls score high with our judges. Screens are high-res and big, a perfect backdrop for the 3D graphics shown for the infotainment system's off-road widgets.

The vehicle's touchscreen responds to inputs quickly, and from its voice recognition system we receive some of the fastest replies ever to audio, navigation and climate requests.

The Hummer's Google operating system is fantastic, too. Google Maps makes it easy to find nearby charging stations, with lots of great detail provided, such as how many chargers at a particular station are working.

Despite its high-tech nature, there still is a good amount of physical switchgear in the cabin. Buttons and knobs are nice and big, making them easy to zero in on and grasp while driving. And, as usual for a GM model, the Hummer also has handy-dandy volume and seek buttons for the audio system on the back of the steering wheel for even easier operation of those functions.

As for storage, the Hummer's frunk, with its padded bags for roof panel storage and specially designed slots to hold them, isn't the largest in the segment, but it's plenty big enough to fit lots of bags during a weekly grocery shopping trip.

On the ADAS front, our $109,000 test vehicle came with enhanced automatic parking assist, rear cross-traffic alert, safety alert seat and a tire-pressure-monitoring system. Lane keeping and distance control also are present, as is GM's excellent Super Cruise Level 3 semi-autonomous adaptive cruise control, standard on ’22 model and beyond Hummers.

Given its progressive design, both physically and digitally, that emphasizes you are indeed in a Hummer, Wards judge Dave Zoia sums up this winning vehicle by noting: "This thing is full on-brand. Nothing subtle here."

More information about text formats