Would you buy a Chinese-made Hummer? Nah.

The New York Times has a column by Randy Cohen, the Ethicist, about the ethics of selling off the brand:

Last Tuesday, one day after General Motors filed for bankruptcy, the automaker announced the sale of its Hummer line to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company in China. Instead of selling this massive, ecologically destructive gas guzzler, should GM have it sent to the scrap heap? Or do the financial needs of the corporation and the prudent use of taxpayer money— thanks to the bailout, the American public owns sixty percent of the company— trump other considerations? The company must act in the interest of its employees and shareholders— in other words, us— but it must also act honorably, which means not abetting the manufacture of products that do significant societal harm. The way to reconcile these dual obligations is to retire the Hummer. (There can be a dignified ceremony with an oration from the behemoth’s longtime booster, that other behemoth, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When the DEA busts a meth house, it doesn’t sell captured drug-making equipment to the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Methamphetamine Company, should that outfit inexplicably exist. Unlike crystal meth, the Hummer is legal, but it is hardly benign. (The “curb weight” of the Hummer H2 is at least 6,600 pounds. Fuel efficiency? About 11 m.p.g. in mixed highway-and-city driving.
Determining what products are too hazardous to market— fen-phen? bite-size toys? Stinger missiles?— should be a matter of public policy, not a series of moral conundrums left to individual companies to resolve. And while it is not the place of government to micromanage a company’s lawful operations, it is appropriate for public officials to promote the general welfare; that’s the rationale for the GM bailout. The collapse of GM provides an opportunity to reconsider transportation policy, including from a moral perspective. Such an analysis urges not merely discontinuing the Hummer but also significantly reducing our reliance on the private car.
Most disconcerting, cars kill. If you introduced a transportation system by announcing that it would kill only 40,000 people a year, it would be unlikely to gain widespread popularity. And that figure is just for accidents. Cars also kill in slow motion— by polluting the air and thus contributing to respiratory disease. Auto emissions also contribute to global warming and degrade the facades of buildings and bridges, via acid rain and other chemical reactions, at enormous public expense.
Cars make us fat. Here in Manhattan, we can walk to the corner deli for milk, bike to work, stroll a few blocks to take the subway to visit friends in Brooklyn. If you live in Atlanta or Phoenix and you want a quart of milk or a job or a social life, you must drive. There’s scant mass transit, and suburban sprawl, a byproduct of the car, puts the deli miles from your house. Your sedentary life, those hours spent sitting in a car, contributes to obesity and its associated illnesses, imposing a huge cost — financial, social, emotional— on other people.
It gets worse. Cars ill serve the old and young. If you are under 16, over 80ish, blind or otherwise physically challenged, you probably don’t drive much. Cars squander scarce public space, turning nearly every street into a parking lot. Cars distort our foreign policy. To keep the oil flowing, we have an alarming tendency to invade other nations and embrace woeful regimes. It is hard to regard Saudi Arabia as a model democracy. For the foreseeable future, the private car will necessarily play a key role in how we get around, but we can wean ourselves from utter dependence. We can build high-speed rail for city-to-city trips of under 500 miles, thereby reducing highway traffic and unclogging our airports, an idea the White House favors. Within our cities, we can develop eco-friendly public transportation, including bus rapid transit, a success around the world.
A revamped GM could spearhead that effort, preserving jobs and earning profits by producing new transit technologies. It would be heartbreaking— ethically, ecologically, economically— if GM emerged from reorganization as much the same company only smaller, a mini-oaf producing harmful products but on a reduced scale.
If we do not adjust, we will lose the moral authority to persuade developing nations not to mimic our autocentric ways. India’s Tata Motors received more than 200,000 orders for its low-cost Nano in the first two weeks of its going on sale. China annually puts millions of new cars on the road and could surpass the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market by year’s end. The effect of these additional cars on climate change will be catastrophic. But if we don’t reform, why should they?
Shutting down Hummer could even turn out to be cost-effective. The sale price, perhaps as much as $500 million, may well be dwarfed by the long-term costs— in environmental damage, in public health— to us taxpayers, GM’s majority owners, of keeping those three tons of steel on the road.
There has been speculation tracing the fall of Rome to its lead-lined aqueducts. That magnificent water system, the apotheosis of Roman genius and power, might have spread lead poisoning throughout the empire, bringing it to its knees. The restructuring of General Motors gives us a chance to avert the fate of being laid low by our own automobiles, the grand manifestation of America’s industrial might.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the Hummers.

Rico says the American public should be allowed to buy whatever stupid, excessive piece of automotive crap it wants; if you're going to kill something, how about starting with the Escalade or some other really big and ugly vehicles?