Introducing the world's most fuel-efficient Hummer. New York artist Jeremy Dean spent his last $15,000 to buy an unloved Hummer H2, cut it in half, made modifications and found two horses to drag it around Central Park. Some agreed it was art, others called it a travesty.
Dean called it "Back to the Futurama," claiming it was part protest, part sculpture, but a definite head-turner. It's otherwise known as "the CEO Stagecoach."
"It is a tongue-in-cheek satirical view of the future," Dean told AOL News. "The Hummer has been called a rolling indictment of the American psyche on wheels. To me, it represents an absolute pinnacle of consumerism and excess in every way.
"The Hummer was once a military vehicle used to kill and protect, and now it's toting people back and forth with lattes and groceries," he said.
Such vehicles were not an uncommon sight in the rural South in the 1930s. They were driven by people who could no longer afford gasoline, so they hitched car bodies to mules and horses.
Dean, 33, bought his eight mpg Hummer from a Florida yard sale of vehicles repossessed by a bank. "If I had gotten a wrecked one, it would not have had the same power," he said.
"I bought it from a dealer in Orlando, and they'd just got it from a bank auction of repossessed vehicles. It was a further monument to the times. I couldn't get a bank and cut that in half, so a Hummer is the next best thing.
"We have been going through a lot of things in this country. The financial meltdown was a big part of everything. A lot of the excess and bigger-is-better thinking of the past two decades got us into the position we are in today," he said.
But Dean does not want to be perceived as a "whining greenie."
