Kiichiro Sato / The Associated Press

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CHICAGO — When the Hummer stormed into our consciousness in the early 1990s, it starred as the victorious chariot of Operation Desert Storm in the first Iraq war.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his pre-governor, pre-green days, made many Americans green with envy when he became the first civilian to own a version of the military's rough-and-tumble Humvee.

Now, with gasoline at a national average price of $4 a gallon for the first time, the Hummer's image is best summed up by the vehicle sitting in the garage of Anthony and Breann Cain of Anderson, Ind.

There their royal blue Hummer sits, on sale now for three months, with no takers in sight.

"It's a great car; we'd love to keep it," said Breann Cain, who is asking $48,000 for the 2007 H2 they bought in May of last year. "But with the gas prices today, it's too expensive to drive. It's just not worth it."

The Cains aren't the only sellers. General Motors Corp. might put the Hummer brand on the sales block, or even shut it down.

It is another sign of how record-high oil prices are changing the way Americans buy everything from plane tickets to food to cars to gasoline.

As recently as five years ago, Hummer's flagship H2 dominated the premium SUV market, a muscular symbol of American ascendancy as much as a set of high-class wheels. No more.

Oil at $130 a barrel, the messy conflict in Iraq, the crash in housing prices and a sluggish economy have taken the sizzle out of Hummer's sales.

It takes 99 days for a dealer to sell one, more than twice as long as five years ago.

And if sales continue at their current rate, only 8,000 H2s will sell this year, fewer than a quarter of the 34,529 sold in the U.S. in 2003.

"Today, the Hummer stands out for the wrong reasons," said Charlie Vogelheim, vice president of automotive development at J.D. Power and Associates.

"With gas prices and global warming and its high-dollar, luxury image, the Hummer's boldness plays against the attitude of the times."

Entire blogs are dedicated to dissing the Hummer. Environmental groups, including Greenpeace and Global Exchange, have called on Schwarzenegger to give back the several Hummers he owns.

"There is a constituency of people who say, 'Screw you, folks, I'm going to buy the Hummer, and you can't stop me,' " said Gal Luft, co-chairman of the Set America Free Coalition, an activist group that focuses on energy as a national security issue.

"We've always felt that the more Hummers we put on the road, the more Humvees we were going to need in the Persian Gulf."

AM General, the company that designed the Humvee in 1979 for the U.S. Army, began to recognize the commercial potential of the truck-size transport vehicle after Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Hummer haters see the vehicle's military origin as yet another reason to dislike even the H3, the midsize offspring of the Humvee, introduced in 2005.

"It represents a kind of meanness to society that a car like that is used as a means of transport on public roads, given its military origins," said John DeCicco, senior fellow of automotive strategies at Environmental Defense Fund.

"They show a disrespect for the fact that there are other people in the world: 'It's all me, and the rest of the world be burned.' "