Hummers are the scorn of environmentalists like me. Without even the guise of spacious utilitarianism that other SUVs have, Hummers are just brutes, emitting three times the carbon dioxide of the average sedan. It’s the perfect, large target for environmental condescension.

Considering how smoggy Las Vegas is, I wonder why people purchase one? Since they range in price from $30,000 for the small(ish) H3 to $150,000 for the original H1, it’s surely not a decision made lightly. Right?

I decided to find out at a local dealership. Hummers, the salesman says, sell themselves—“[They say] ‘I can afford an 8,000-pound recreational Ferrari, and you can’t.’”

It’s this image that SUV automakers have capitalized on all along. In 2003’s best-selling High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher says market researchers found SUV drivers to be insecure and vain—and the bigger the SUV, the more insecure and vain the driver.

Researchers also said SUV drivers lack confidence in their driving skills. I’m certainly feeling this lack of confidence when I jump (literally) into the driver’s seat. I anxiously look over at the salesman, awaiting instructions. He is very, very far away in the passenger seat. The console is so large that we could play Monopoly on it—if I wasn’t so preoccupied with how I am going to maneuver a war machine through the streets on a Friday afternoon.

I turn over the beastly engine and take off. I feel like I’m riding a bull in a passenger-car shop. The fatality rate for drivers of passenger cars struck by trucks like this is four times greater than vice-versa. Remembering this factoid, I drive apologetically.

Meanwhile, the salesman is explaining that the H1 is meant for off-roading, not, um, on-roading.And it shows. The H1 (7,847 pounds, 8 miles per gallon) lurches, has slow pick-up and rocks back and forth upon stopping. Next, I try the H2 (6,400 pounds 11 mpg) and the H3 (4,700 pounds and 15 mpg). The H2 is comparable in size and environmental impact to the Ford Expedition (5,799 pounds, 14 city mpg), Chevy Suburban (5,607 pounds, 14 mpg) and Cadillac Escalade (5,814 pounds, 14 city mpg). The H3 is comparable to the smaller SUVs.

In comparison, a Toyota Corolla weighs 2,844 pounds and gets 32 mpg. A Honda Civic, 2,886 pounds and 32 mpg. Neither can tow a 300-foot yacht.

By the H3, I’m wondering how I might feel if I never had that environmental science 101 class in college. If I didn’t know, or care to consider, the consequences of my actions, would I enjoy the tiny steering wheel, the spacious console and the signal to other drivers that I had arrived? Not just to the red light, but in life?

The H2 and H3 are much friendlier vehicles, and the salesman tells me they have major “mom appeal” because of the their safety. But SUVs have an eight percent higher occupant fatality rate than cars. Rollovers account for 62 percent of SUV deaths.

Although the salesmen insist that the Hummer’s appeal is its off-roading abilities, I’m lucky to find a few owners Saturday afternoon packing their trucks with groceries at a Summerlin shopping center—in a parking lot, not off-road.

But Angela and Kevin Hanneman got their H3 almost a year ago and say they have indeed off-roaded. They traded in their Nissan Xterra for the H3 because they liked the brand and could now afford it. Another Hummer driver, Heather Aaron, got the H2 because she likes big trucks. Simple enough. So does she off-road? “It’s too expensive to go off-roading in,” she says. She later rolls through a stop sign and almost runs me over while I’m crossing the parking lot; I’m thinking she might want to give off-roading a try.

Aaron Jones owns one of 25 H6s in the world, a customized H2 with 48 inches added to the rear, meaning six total tires are needed. He chose the H6 as the perfect vehicle to promote his gym.

“People recognize it. It’s excessive. And that’s what Vegas is all about—shallow losers,” the Vegas resident says. Jones laughs when I ask about the environment, and he tells me if he thought not driving a Hummer would save the planet, he’d drive the H6 into a wall.

This is about when I realize that my disdain of Hummer owners is proportionately related to the size of their vehicle. Because, come on, does the size of their tank really assuage their insecurity in their driving skills, in addition to solidifying their social status? But then, is it really productive of me to smugly hate on Hummer owners?

I guess in the end, our reactions to this outrageous vehicle send the same message to each other: “I’m above you.” For Hummer owners, the meaning is literal ... for environmentalists, it’s figurative.

This is no Grand Prix

Our beaters are breaking the bank

Damon Hodge: Henry Ford can kiss my naturally black ass. If not for vehicles, we wouldn’t need highways and without highways, we wouldn’t have smog and congestion and carbon dioxide, and without all those life-inhibiting pollutants, we wouldn’t have global warming ... see where I’m going with this? I guess I should also tell you where I’m coming from. That’d be the Goodyear store on Meadows Lane, where I just spent $157 on a new tire for a truck I just finished paying off (the worst-spent $23,000 of my life) ...

Joshua Longobardy: That—$157—might be enough to cover the dysfunctional windows on my coupe, neither of which can open and close without manual assistance. You see, my car is a BMW 318ti, and it’s a real piece of shit; and in the two years I’ve owned it thus far, my greatest misfortune is not the latter, that it’s a real piece of shit, but the former, that it’s a BMW, because I’ve learned that even if a man buys his Beemer used, and at a bare-bones price, he is still assumed, when he goes to the mechanic, to be as rich as the man who bought it new. Which is why I had continued to drive it without a reliable stereo system, with the Check Engine light permanently on, without the hatchback working, with very low oil, and, to my misery, without an air conditioner.

But at least then I could drive it. Now, it’s quiescent. For the head gasket is screwed; and if you know anything about head gaskets, it’s that they’re expensive as hell to fix on any car.

Julie Seabaugh: Truck you and your measly $157. After flagellating my possession-packed ’97 Pontiac over 26 hours’ worth of Rocky Mountains and amber-waved grain plains, I shelled out $874 for a complete radiatorectomy. Then $398 for something involving power fluids and/or spark filters. Then $96 for, yes, a new tire ...

Damon: Man, pipe down. That $157 is approximately ... ain’t shiznit compared to the $14,000 I’ve spent in the last three years repairing two arthritic, convalescent-worthy 1996 vehicles (a Nissan Sentra and a Pontiac Sunfire) and a 1999 Cheep, er, Jeep Cherokee whose tires seem magnetized to nails, whose fuel system leaks more than a diuretic’s diaper and whose slipshod brakes make me wish it’d had holes in the floor so I could use the Flintstone method of braking. That’s right, you whiny babies, $14,000. That’s more than the gross domestic product of some small third-world country. That’s a college education for a Nevada student with a Millennium Scholarship. That’s more than you pay in rent a year. That’s probably more than the Kelly Blue Book value of your ’97 Pontiac, Juelz Santana, and way more than you’ve plunked down to fix your busted-down Beemer, oh-my-Goshua. I could’ve bought a new vehicle, started a 529 plan for the expected litter of little Hodges, covered the now-defunct Café Roma’s rent for a spell, got bailed out of jail after being found near $80,000 worth of weed, put a down payment down on a condo, took nearly four months off without pay ... need I go on? Y’all can come holla at me when you’ve seen your credit score become inversely proportional to your vehicle repair bills (they go up, it goes down).