Checkered fate: Honda S2000, Cadillac XLR go buh-bye - Los Angeles Times
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.
