I just spent a week driving the GMC Hummer EV, a ridiculously quick and astoundingly huge vehicle that’s nerve-wracking to pilot on the cramped and crowded streets of NYC. The new electric Hummer is genuinely impressive, and I’ll have more to say on it in a future article, but for now I want to talk about something I found buried deep in a sub-menu on the dashboard touchscreen: An icon that shows a Hummer EV driving over a Tesla Cybertruck, labelled VPRWR. Vaporware, get it? Very cheeky, GMC.
See, like a lot of modern off-road vehicles, the Hummer has a bunch of auxiliary electrical circuits installed from the factory to control aftermarket stuff you might install on your rig: Off-road lights, winches, tire pumps, stuff like that. But while most automakers control these circuits with a row of physical rocker switches, the Hummer’s aux switches are configurable touchscreen buttons accessed via the Off Road page on the infotainment screen.
You can configure each button with a label you type in and an icon chosen from a whole plethora of options. The icons range from practical and predictable — CB radios, air horns, lights — to downright goofy. Fancy a Frankenstein’s monster to control your trailer lights? Perhaps a vintage NASA spacecraft for your radar detector? GMC has you covered.
It’s there, at the very bottom of the button icon palette, that we find this cartoon of a Hummer EV clamoring up the windshield of something that certainly resembles a Tesla Cybertruck.
The squashed Cybertruck is one of a few icons that seem to poke fun at the Hummer’s competitors. You can also choose clipart of a meteor about to strike a dinosaur (hello, Ram TRX), or a Bigfoot-lookin’ character on the trot (gotcha, Ford Bronco Sasquatch package). Remember, this is a vehicle with a launch mode that’s officially named “Watts To Freedom”. Coming from the traditionally strait-laced General Motors, this is an utterly buckwild amount of goofin’. I love it.
Now, I have no way of knowing whether the VPRWR button on this particular Hummer was configured that way by a GM employee, or by a fellow automotive journalist who’d borrowed the vehicle before me. Vehicles in an automaker’s media fleet get passed around to a bunch of different folks, and car reviewers often poke around in the most remote sub-menus that don’t get touched by regular drivers. But while the “VPRWR” label was manually keyed-in by someone with a sense of humour, the Cybertruck cartoon came straight from the GMC factory.
Whoever set up the VPRWR button got a chuckle out of me. If the Cybertruck ever actually escapes the vaporware curse and goes into production, I won’t be surprised if it has some sort of Easter egg in its touchscreen with a return-fire zing at the Hummer. Maybe it’ll be next to the fart button.