Lexus HS 250h

We didn’t like it much when it was introduced for 2010, and car buyers seemed to agree.

The first dedicated hybrid from Toyota’s luxury brand, the HS 250h was unveiled at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show and sold for just three model years.

While Lexus hoped to sell 25,000 or 30,000 HS hybrids a year, it didn’t come close. It sold 6,699 during 2009, hit a high of just 10,663 in 2010, and saw sales plummet to 2,864 last year.

It was far more popular in Japan, where it was sold as the Toyota Sai and logged enough advance orders that U.S. allocation for the Lexus version was reduced.

The Lexus HS 250h thus joins a growing list of defunct hybrids that now includes the Honda Accord Hybrid, the Dodge Durango and Chrysler Aspen Hybrid SUVs, the Nissan Altima Hybrid, and most recently, the Mercedes-Benz ML 450h and BMW ActiveHybrid X6.

Mercedes-Benz R350 BlueTEC

A very large station wagon built on the underpinnings of the vastly more popular ML Series of crossovers, the Mercedes-Benz R Class never found its audience in the States.

Built from 2006 through 2012, the last few years of R Class production for the U.S. market were fitted with the V-6 BlueTEC diesel engine, a popular option among the car services and high-end fleet buyers who purchased the few hundred vehicles sold each month.

Export models of the Mercedes-Benz R Class will stay in production in Alabama for a few more years, but 2012 was its last year on the U.S. market.

It only goes to show that anything that smacks of a station wagon is a doomed proposition in the U.S. market. The R Class could be ordered with all-wheel drive just like a crossover, but because it wasn’t jacked up to the ride height of a truck, buyers just weren’t interested.

Tesla Roadster

Finally, there’s the Tesla Roadster, only 2,600 of which were built. A crude, clumsy, and expensive two-seat sports car, the Roadster by itself kickstarted the modern-day electric-car revolution.

No less a personage that GM’s Bob Lutz cited the Roadster in getting the Chevy Volt approved.

With its 53-kilowatt-hour battery pack made up of 6,831 lithium-ion “18650 commodity cells” like those used in laptops mobile phones, the Roadster was the first demonstration of the technology that launched Tesla Motors–a venture-funded startup car company in Silicon Valley–and blazed the trail for mass-market cars to come.

Tesla says it’s within weeks of delivering its first Model S all-electric luxury sport sedans to paying customers, but we should pause to honor the Roadster’s seminal role.

The grumpy middle-aged men of the auto press who uniformly sneered at electric cars often underwent miraculous conversions after wheel time in the Tesla Roadster.

One experience of its grab-you-and-throw-you-silently-at-the-horizon electric acceleration, and many looked at the world a whole new way.

And no one who’s driven one is likely to forget that first ride.

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