Checkered fate: Honda S2000, Cadillac XLR go buh-bye

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In “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell wrote: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Socrates said the same thing but was a miserable singer. In any event, the days of wistful remembrance are here for the Cadillac XLR and Honda S2000 -– and you can bet other pricey niche products are slouching toward the gallows too (Lexus SC430 mebbe?).

General Motors revealed this week that it would lay off 154 workers at the Bowling Green, Ky., factory where the XLR is produced alongside its chassis-mate, the Chevrolet Corvette. The XLR was always an unlikely story. Born of Cadillac’s Art and Science design vocabulary as first iterated on the Evoq concept car (1999), the XLR was a super halo for the brand, and its strange and ambitious shape looked like absolutely nothing else on the road -– “a malevolent crystal grown in zero gravity,” is how I described the car in 2003. Under the provocative sheetmetal was a Corvette chassis, with transverse leaf spring rear suspension and a de-tuned Corvette motor. It was also GM’s technology spear point: The XLR was the first car in the world to use the Delphi’s magnetorrheic suspension, which varies shock rates in real time. In terms of sales you could credit the Escalade or the CTS with Cadillac’s resurrection, but the brand’s styling always gravitated toward the XLR.

Well, that was fun. Cadillac sold only 1,250 XLRs in 2008 (for between $80,000 to $100,000, give or take a few thousand) and considering the sorry state of things, a redesign of the aging roadster was apparently out of the question. Goodnight, sweet prince.

Ditto Honda’s S2000, a fantastic, minimalistic roadster that -– with its bonkers-with-rpm 2.2-liter, 240-hp four cylinder -– felt like throwing a saddle on a bumblebee. The car received a brush-up for the 2004 model year, and a hard-edged, weaponized track version (the CR) in 2008, but the sales just weren’t there. Honda says it sold just 2,538 units in 2008 (at or above $34,000), adding to a respectable U.S. total of some 65,000 units since 1998.

With the retirement of the S2000, Honda’s commitment to adrenaline is very much in doubt. The next-generation NSX –- a mid-engine exoticar -– has been spiked and Honda notoriously pulled out of Formula 1 last year. So what will go fast and wear the flying H? A Fit Type R? Oh, what troubled times we live in.

And speaking of big yellow taxis …. Auto-parts maker Checker of Kalamazoo, Mich., maker of the unforgettable Checker Marathon taxi cab, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month. The company ceased production of taxi cabs in 1982, but there has never been -– nor will there ever be -– a better taxi. As someone who hung out in New York in the early 1980s, I can tell you the sins possible in the jump seats of a Checker Marathon would stagger the imagination.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

-- Dan Neil