Hummer is another one of General Motor’s zombie brands that will likely soon cease to exist (if no last minute buyer steps up). The builder of gas-guzzling SUV’s was thought to have been saved when Chinese construction company Sichuan Tengzhong, but the Chinese government squashed the deal. GM was preparing to wind down the brand, even as it entertained two other potential buyers.

But Hummer still has a little bit of life left in it, apparently. A large fleet order was placed for 849 Hummer H3 and H3T pickups. That is enough to put the Shreveport, Louisiana plant back to work for an extra month.

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Just how much help was Cash for Clunkers for automakers and America? A new study by The Maritz Automotive Research Group suggests that the Cash for Clunkers program may have been more successful than first thought.

Cash for Clunkers — which spent about $2.8 billion in incentives on about 690,000 cars sold last summer — has been criticized for costing too much and having too stringent of guidelines about what cars could be traded in. Still, Ford and GM sales are up, as are car sales as a whole, so maybe all that hubbub about robbing from “future sales” wasn’t all that accurate.

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As we’ve talked about on these pages before, the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of car purchasers is starting. By the end of the year many major auto manufacturers will have some kind of electric vehicle for sale on the mass market and by 2014, nearly all major manufacturers have plans to introduce at least one electric car.

In these early stages, carmakers have chosen several different paths, some opting to go for the cars powered solely by batteries (Battery Electric Vehicles or BEVs) such as the Nissan LEAF, some for the plug-in hybrids (PHEVs; like a Prius with a bigger battery), and some for the extended range electric vehicles (EREVs with small generators on board to charge the batteries) such as the Chevy Volt.

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