Will tuners soon be able to unlock all the power to make the Hummer do wheelies?
Is there a future for tuners if all cars are electric? We think so. On the one hand, because the existing petrol cars and enthusiasts will not disappear. And on the other hand, because apparently there are still a few things that can be unlocked with electric vehicles. Take the thickest version of the GMC Hummer EV with 1,000 hp and 15,500 Nm (fifteen thousand!). That thing is apparently so powerful (and at 4,000+ pounds heavy enough not to get wheelspin) that it can do wheelies.
Al Oppenheiser, the chief engineer of the GMC Hummer EV, tells The Drive: “In the early days, when we were just trying to balance the front and rear torque, I got the front in the air.” For ‘functional safety reasons’, torque is now limited so that all wheels remain on the ground in the fastest driving mode. By the way, this mode is called WTF (Watts to Freedom) mode. The 0-100 time in this mode is around 3 seconds. Again: with a car of 4,000 kilos.
Electric cars have untapped potential
We don’t recommend it, of course, but a handy software tuner could dig into the code in the future to release all the newton meters on the rear wheels. In any case, electric cars are driving computers. This makes it all just a bit too artificial for certain enthusiasts, but it does offer a lot of opportunities to make something beautiful out of it. This is easier said than done, by the way, because car manufacturers will do their very best to close the code.
The GMC Hummer EV doesn’t do wheelies, but it can do another trick
The rear wheels of the GMC Hummer steer along. Now that’s nothing new, because you can even get such a system on a Renault Mégane, but the Hummer uses its four-wheel steering for a special crab mode. The wheels then steer in the same direction at low speed. This allows the Hummer to move sideways, much like a crab. Handy for challenging off-road work, or on a cramped (crab?) construction site. You can see what that looks like in this video.
