(YouTube Link)
As a statement about modern consumerism and consumption, artist Jeremy Dean converted a Hummer into a horse drawn coach:
The work involves a black Hummer H2 (which the artist says gets about 9 miles to the gallon and came tricked out with DVD players in the headsets) partly dismantled and refashioned in the style of a horse-drawn carriage. Dean says the project is inspired by the “Hoover Carts” that cropped up in some rural parts of the U.S. during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, some owners who couldn’t afford to gas up their vehicles, cut them in half and hitched them to horses or mules and used them as carriages to save on fuel.[...]
The Hummer represents all that is wrong with consumer culture, says Dean. He says he sees parallels between the Hummer and the GM vehicles that came out during the 1920s, which were widely bought using some of the earliest versions of consumer credit, then became unaffordable when the Depression hit.
Link via The Presurfer
As for the message, I think it's a point worth making. It's important to note that he's commenting on how we buy vehicles we can't afford--not to begin with, and not to maintain--with money we don't have. This is bad for our economy both because people go bankrupt as a result of all the status symbols they feel obligated to buy and because so do the companies that make them when their consumers can no longer afford their product. It's in everyone's best interests to aim closer to what we need.