The forerunner of the modern sport utility vehicle, or SUV, existed as early as the late 1940s, but for decades, they were impractical for ordinary everyday drivers — their complex mechanical transmissions, rigid axles, poor balance, and slow highway speeds were just not attractive to consumers. It's often thought that the prominence of the big "land yacht" sedans and station wagons of the 1960s and 1970s are what led to the modern SUV, and although those fell out of favor after the 1973 oil crisis, the crisis led to an interesting regulatory quirk.
In the United States, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulation, or CAFE, was designed to encourage manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient cars. However, CAFE had a loophole for "light trucks", which allowed manufacturers to continue making them. It made sense, as there were quite a few working professionals who needed the power and utility of a big vehicle, and back in The '70s they couldn't be made efficient enough to comply with the regulation, so they were made exempt. But "light truck" was defined quite broadly, and the carmakers decided to market everyday cars as "light trucks". As long as they were theoretically designed for off-road or heavy-duty use and could theoretically be employed in that capacity, that's what they were. Probably the most egregious instance of this gaming of regulations was the Chrysler PT Cruiser, a retraux station wagon built on the same platform as the Neon compact but engineered such that it was technically a "light truck".
It averaged 19 miles per gallon in city driving and 24 in highway driving, a gas-guzzler for something of its size and weight, but classifying it as a light truck not only improved the CAFE rankings of Chrysler's truck lineup, it also kept the car from dragging down the CAFE rankings of Chrysler's car lineup. This may be one of the reasons why it remained in production, virtually unchanged, from 2000 until 2010 despite seeing its sales collapse after 2006.
And people still wanted to buy big cars, because they were perceived as safer. Until the Turn of the Millennium, it was generally believed that the safest cars were the ones most likely to survive an accident, as opposed to the ones most likely to avoid one. The "land yacht" sedans and wagons gave way to minivans in The '80s, which themselves gave way to SUVs in the '90s — the Jeep Cherokee and the Ford Explorer were so successful that they effectively started an arms race to see who could make the biggest possible SUV that they could get away with. Chevrolet redesigned their Blazer from a workhorse to a family crawler to compete with the Explorer and introduced the Tahoe as a bigger version thereof (and redesigned the Suburban into a bigger version of that), Jeep upped the ante on the Cherokee with the Grand Cherokee, Ford did the same on the Explorer with the Expedition and the Excursion, Lincoln debuted a luxury version of the Expedition called the Navigator, Cadillac responded in kind with the Suburban-based Escalade, and even Japanese automakers got into the game with the Nissan Pathfinder and the Toyota 4Runner and Sequoia. Of the major automakers selling cars in the US, only Honda and Volkswagen, both committed to smaller cars, sat the arms race out, their SUV offerings remaining steadfastly smaller, more fuel-efficient, and more car-like than the competition.
The Hummer itself was introduced in the early 1990s and based directly on the U.S. military's High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), or "Humvee". While it was a cult item in The '90s that was associated with victory in The Gulf War and Hollywood action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, its high price and lack of creature comforts prevented widespread adoption outside a niche market. It didn't see widespread popularity until around 2002, when the less expensive H2 model was introduced right at the beginning of The War on Terror, when there was an additional patriotic reason to drive a pseudo-military vehicle at a time when U.S. military operations overseas were seeing some of their highest levels of support. There was a particular feeling that the Hummer and cars like it were connected to right-wing politics, feelings of aggrieved masculinity, and anti-environmentalism. It was seen as something of a "reactionary" purchase; while people were going on about how they wanted to save the environment, the people who pined for the good old days wanted to shove this in the faces of everyone who drove a Toyota Prius.
Of course, the self-styled patriots weren't the only ones getting in on the action. Others combined the Hummer Dinger with the Rice Burner to make a truly unholy and expensive combination, fitting their SUVs with extensive cosmetic modifications like scissor doors, hydraulics, earth-rattling stereo systems, and gigantic rims (or "dubs", after the DUB Wheels company that was famous for them). Glam Rap videos in the '00s loved their souped-up H2s and Escalades, which quickly came to enjoy a similar cultural niche as the classic lowriders and pimpmobiles of the '60s and '70s.
But in the end, the environmentalists kind of won out. The Hummer brand's popularity started to tank around 2006 as gas prices went up, and it was shut down entirely in 2010. The gas-electric hybrid car also took off during this time, and soon after came electric cars. When gas prices calmed down and the economy recovered somewhat, people still weren't in the mood for genuine Hummer Dingers, not just because of their terrible fuel-efficiency and environmental impact, but also because of their stiff handling and tendency to roll over. Instead, they migrated to the "crossover utility vehicle", a "land yacht" for the modern age. These were effectively station wagons and hatchbacks with lifted suspensions and optional all-wheel drive — rather than off-road vehicles configured for everyday use, these are everyday vehicles configured for (light) off-road use. This made them easier to handle and much more fuel-efficient than the dreadnought SUVs of the 1980s and 1990s, almost within striking distance of the fuel economy of the regular cars they were based on.
Hummer Dingers are still around today, but the people in the market for them overwhelmingly favor pickup trucks, which are much more obviously not "family haulers". Luxury pickups emerged in the 2010s to cater to this market, packing enough features to rival a BMW or a Cadillac and with a price point to match. The modifications evolved in the direction of the "bro truck", a pickup given mostly cosmetic modifications (especially lift kits and large wheels and tires) specifically to make them look like off-road vehicles, with little to no regard for actual off-road performance. Again, anti-environmentalism is a theme here, with these trucks embraced as Conspicuous Consumption to tell environmentalists that they can't tell these trucks' owners what to do. Some may even outfit them with "coal rollers", which force the exhaust to belch out thick smoke. Again, it was all to annoy the environmentalists. And even there, by the '20s electric pickup trucks, from both legacy automakers like Ford and GM and upstarts like Rivian and Tesla, were hitting the market to massive hype. Ironically, by 2024, Tesla's Cybertruck, an electric pickup truck, had begun filling the niche of "seemingly rugged truck used as a status symbol and will almost never actually be used for off-roading" despite obviously lacking the fuel economy issues of classic examples of the trope.
Outside American suburbia, however, there wasn't much point to a Hummer Dinger. In places like Asia and Europe, the streets are much narrower, fuel is more expensive, and parking spaces are more scarce even in the suburbs, so a big vehicle would be so frustrating to drive that it would defeat anyone's desire to show off. In other places with big rural areas, a big vehicle needs actual utility, so you would have to get something that's actually up for the job — and then it would be relatively unremarkable. The only places that really have the Hummer Dinger phenomenon are places like Britain and Australia that draw many cultural cues from America to begin with (whether they'd like to admit it or not), and the Mexican countryside where imported Suburbans turned out to be very useful for hauling eight narco-goons and their "product" through rough desert terrain. The British "Chelsea Tractor" tends to be particularly hilariously impractical to drive on Britain's narrower and more sinuous country roads — a suburban or inner city Range Rover driver is going to find out the hard way that he's going to struggle to drive it to the country pub. Ironically, the success of the Land Rover and Range Rover marques in the USA in recent years means that the Chelsea Tractor has gained a foothold in the States as well, fitting into the niche Hummer Dingers established before their arrival.
