2024 GMC Hummer EV SUV on the Drag Strip: WTF Was That?

“Thank God for the Tesla Cybertruck,” wrote one poster in an online forum I was recently reading for the 2024 GMC Hummer EVs. “Now I don’t look like the biggest dork in the neighborhood in my Hummer EV anymore!”

OK, they didn’t say “dork,” but I’m being PG-rated here. The fact is, before Tesla’s stainless-steel-dumpster-replica Cybertruck actually hit the streets, the King of the More-Money-Than-Sense-EV-Hill was the 2024 GMC Hummer EV, in either pickup truck or SUV guise. Expensive as hell, portly as a fully-loaded heavy-duty dually, styled to look like a lunar lander inside and able to blast to nearly inconceivable speeds, the Hummer EV is a flagship technology showcase for GM’s Ultium battery technology. It’s meant to be outrageous, to get everyone talking, to appear on the covers of the few remaining print magazines and grace the landing pages of countless websites and YouTube channels. And in doing all of that, it has been an unquestionable marketing and word-of-mouth (if not necessarily sales-volume) success.

Related: Living With a GMC Hummer EV: 5 Things You Need to Know

So when we finally got our hands on the SUV version of the GMC Hummer EV, ostensibly the more practical version of the two, it felt almost dirty that all of us absolutely fell in love with it. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Does it take up far more room than it should in a parking lot or highway lane? Definitely. Does it bring a smile to everyone’s face the moment you stomp the accelerator? Without fail.

And it’s that last bit that had us truly wondering: What’ll it do? So, we took GMC’s beast right from the street to the drag strip, no additional preparations required, by renting Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisc., to see just how fast this electric Hummer is from 0-60 mph and in the quarter-mile.

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The Beast

We know loving this thing is irrational, but we can’t help ourselves — it’s just so totally outrageous and fun to drive that it’s an experience unlike anything else on the road. It’s heavy. It has up to 830 horsepower and “11,500 pounds-feet of torque,” but that’s using some odd way of measuring torque that literally nobody else in the industry uses, so we’ll simply list that figure as “unknown.” We also don’t know exactly how much capacity the enormous double-stacked Ultium lithium-ion battery pack has, as GMC hasn’t officially specified that figure, but given the observed efficiency and range of the truck, we estimate it has to be more than 200 kilowatt-hours. Oh yeah, and GMC says the thing should be able to go from 0-60 mph in 3.5 seconds, so there is that.

Our test vehicle was a 2024 SUV in 3X trim, meaning it has a tri-motor drivetrain with two electric motors in the back and one up front. It has four-wheel steering that can either shorten the turning circle to an astonishing 35.4 feet or, using CrabWalk mode, make the Hummer EV drive nearly sideways. For all its hugeness, it only seats five in two rows, and the cargo area has a ridiculously high liftover and a heavy swing gate instead of a conventional liftgate. This model came equipped with massive 22-inch wheels wearing chunky all-terrain tires in some sort of concession to the Hummer EV’s off-road capability — which it truly has; we’ve tested the pickup version off-road and have found it to be supremely capable in the dirt, if a bit unwieldy.

The interior is seemingly made of cheap plastic, but arranged in shapes and patterns that are nothing short of state-of-the-art designs. The displays have graphics running on Unreal Engine software, the same stuff that underpins a number of popular video games, which is why the graphics for everything from changing drive modes to using the off-road pages look like they’re from the latest multiplayer role-playing games. The translucent plastic roof comes off in four panels plus an unboltable spar over the front seats for the nearest open-air experience you can get this side of a Jeep Wrangler.

The total as-tested price for this creation was an eye-watering $107,610. But all of it is undeniably, amazingly, irrationally, overpoweringly cool. But just how overpowered is it, really? Just how quick is this thing, we wondered?

WTF? No Really, WTF?

You can just roll your rig up to a test-and-tune night at your local drag strip and run it down the quarter-mile, sure, but if you want the best numbers, it’s smart to pay for your own day with the strip. At Great Lakes Dragaway, that comes with staff to prep the launch area, clean the track, operate the Christmas tree signals and hand you some slips of paper with your results after each run (not to mention also having an ambulance on standby, just in case). We added a few other things for our test including a Racelogic VBox Touch 25-hertz data logger, a super-accurate method for recording 0-60 mph times, quarter-mile times and achieved speeds at the end of the quarter-mile. Our 0-60 times are without drag-strip rollout, while the quarter-mile times include rollout; the difference is usually just fractions of a second.

What allows a vehicle as huge and massive as the Hummer EV SUV to achieve unbelievable acceleration is some electronic trickery — specifically, something called “WTF” mode, or “Watts to Freedom” mode (uh huh, sure it is). This is a special hidden mode within the various electronically selectable modes that changes how the Hummer EV operates, but you won’t find it in the mode selector button. Activating it involves coming to a stop, pushing the stability control button twice and then following the instructions on the gauge cluster display. What WTF mode does is turn everything up to its maximum output and sporting ability. The battery pack’s state of charge also needs to be greater than 20%, and it has to be preconditioned properly as well, as it’s about to experience a massive, rapid current draw. The air suspension will drop to its lowest setting for optimal front-to-rear weight transfer upon acceleration; in any other mode, the Hummer’s nose points to the sky on hard acceleration, and it dives like a spooked submarine when you stomp on the brakes. WTF mode is a maximum acceleration mode meant to repeatedly rip off crazy numbers in highly controlled fashion — and that’s exactly what we did with it.

Nothing This Big Should Be This Quick

To engage the big blue bruiser’s WTF mode, we first rolled up to the start line. Press the stability control button twice, confirm with the steering-wheel button, then use your left foot to hold the brake pedal down as hard as the truck tells you to (and it will tell you if you’re not pushing hard enough). The truck will lower itself into proper ride height and engage a low, rumbling warning noise that sounds like an Imperial Star Destroyer about to make the jump to light speed, which is actually rather prescient. While holding down the brake pedal with your left foot, use your right foot to floor the accelerator. When you’re ready to launch, let your left foot slip off the brake and hold the “freedom” on ‘cause this is when you rocket away from the start line in a warp-speed rush of blurred scenery and crescendoing electronic noise. Keep that accelerator mashed and the wheel straight until you get through the traps, and then haul down on the brakes to bring The Hulk to a halt. It’s equal parts terrifying and thrilling, and you cannot help but laugh uncontrollably at the absurdity of it.

Our very first run, on cold all-terrain tires on a clean track prepared with sticky synthetic resin traction compound, netted us a 0-60-mph time of 3.93 seconds and a quarter-mile time of 12.14 seconds at 112.14 mph — not exactly what GM said the Hummer EV could do under perfect conditions, but holy hell, still an insane result for a vehicle this huge and heavy.

From there, we tried a few other methods to get some additional heat into the tires, but burnouts aren’t easy in a vehicle like this. We did enact a simple weight reduction program (removing the huge, heavy spare tire from the rear swing gate), and after some additional runs managed to get the 0-60 time down to a seriously impressive 3.76 seconds.

Our best quarter-mile time came in at a measured 11.976 seconds at 112.41 mph — on the track’s equipment; the Vbox data logger called it 12.00 seconds even. But hey, if the track’s gear is good enough for the International Hot Rod Association, it’s good enough for me, so I’m going to call the Hummer EV an 11-second SUV, which is nothing short of incredible. Trap speeds were some variation of 112 mph every single time. Again and again. Quarter-mile times also did not vary much, ranging from 12.00 to 12.41 seconds. The Hummer EV hits what is clearly a software-induced wall around 100 mph; you can feel it suddenly pull power and slow you slightly when you get there. But the consistency of its quarter-mile runs, time after time, is truly impressive.

Why couldn’t we hit the 3.5-second 0-60 time that GMC advertises? Mostly it was due to grip — or a lack of it. The tires, as mentioned, were all-terrains with a stiff and chunky tread block, and the front ones quite literally spun through the first 20 feet of motion despite the super-sticky track surface and our best efforts to make them hook up. That’s how powerful the Hummer EV is, that even in its launch mode it can’t quite cope with all the torque it generates. If we were to fit some grippier tires to the Hummer EV or increase the weight over the front wheels (the spare wheel and tire didn’t quite fit in the frunk, though we tried), there’s no doubt this thing would launch even better and put up even quicker times.

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In a fit of curiosity, we also took the Hummer EV SUV on the autocross course we’d set up for the other EV we were testing at the track: the new 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. You might think a massive SUV would be awful on an autocross course, and in most cases, you’d be right. One run through the course in the Hummer EV’s Normal drive mode confirmed that, with pitching, rolling, diving and squealing (mostly from the tires, some from the driver) ensuing. But our curiosity again got the better of us, and we put the Hummer EV SUV in WTF mode for the autocross course — not something it’s really meant for. But lowering the truck, stiffening up the suspension and changing the accelerator response (combined with the incredibly tight turning diameter provided by the four-wheel steering) turned this huge SUV into an unbelievable track star. We didn’t time any of the runs through the course, but we didn’t need to — if the point of an autocross is to have fun with your vehicle in a controlled environment, the Hummer EV SUV is just as successful at doing that on a tight, twisty, cone-strewn parking lot as it is on a quarter-mile drag strip. This thing is a riot.

What Did We Learn?

Well, after having years of experience running big-engined, supercharged, fire-breathing Dodge Hellcats and Ford Mustangs down drag strips, we learned that yes, there actually is a “replacement for displacement.” You don’t need a huge gas-sucking internal combustion engine to have incredible acceleration at the drag strip. You don’t even need a two-door sports car — a full-size, hundred-thousand-dollar electric SUV can do the trick just as well these days. Ain’t technology great?

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