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The newish Governor of California and action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Hummer jeep will forever be associated with each other.
Impressed by the military jeep抯 performance in the first Gulf War in 1991, he got hold of a couple shortly afterwards, and certainly the vast bulk of the car seems to match his tough-guy image. He spent many months persuading AM General (now part of General Motors) to make a civilian version, which they eventually did with the H1. Later the company produced the somewhat more practical, but still gigantic, H2. Striving to soften and widen his image, Schwarzenegger talked to Hummer owner GM about making a model that was, ahem, somewhat less environmentally uncompromising. In response GM has come up with a hydrogen powered version, the H2H.
In 2002, Schwarzenegger returned a Ferrari 360 Spider which he had recently bought, saying it didn抰 fit his new image. The flashy car, he told the dealership's president, might give potential voters the wrong idea: "I feel I need a car that would better telegraph my image as a candidate for California governor - a car that says I'm a man of the people."
Despite this however, in March 2003 he bought an Austrian six-wheeled tank called a Pinskower, and modified to render it legal to drive on city streets.
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