Nothing is forever, especially in the car biz. Here are six vehicles that won’t be cluttering up the showrooms in 2014. 

While they may be on their way out, there’s no need to shed a tear for any of these vehicles. They’re headed to a far better place, the place we call automotive history. In this magical locale, cars are treated with much greater kindness and generosity than they experienced in their mortal lives.

Just wait. Twenty years from now, we’ll be reading how all these cars were simply ahead of their time. Or that new car buyers just weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the obvious virtues of gems like these. No, these cars weren’t losers at all; they were simply misunderstood. So here they are, six of the most misunderstood vehicles of 2013.

Overweight and underwhelming, the 2006-on Volvo C70 convertible never made its sales numbers despite the clear gee-whiz appeal of its three-piece retractable hardtop. Sources say the replacement will be based on the recent Volvo Coupe Concept.

With no minivan of its own for the North American market, in 2009 Volkswagen went to Chrysler for a badge-engineered variant of the Town and Country. Never a strong seller, the Volkswagen Routan was dumped for 2014, to be replaced by the CrossBlue crossover hybrid in 2015, insiders say.

The Subaru Tribeca entered the market in 2006 with high hopes, but demand proved shallow for the three-row crossover. Only 994 units cleared the lots in 2012—statistical noise, essentially. Subaru has a replacement in development that will appear in 2015.

Actually, the Toyota Matrix is a very popular car—wearing its standard Corolla sheet metal. In hatchback utility sedan form as the Matrix, not so much. Nicely packaged but dowdy compared to newer offerings in its niche like the Kia Soul, in 2014 the Matrix joins its Pontiac Vibe twin in the discard pile.

Cadillac’s ersatz pickup, the Escalade EXT, is a virtual poster child for the old, bad General Motors. In its time it produced juicy markups for the company, but in the first half of 2013, barely a thousand units were sold. For 2014, the EXT and its Chevrolet cousin the Avalanche are no more.

The beautifully sculpted Acura ZDX was the answer. The question? No one was asking. The market was not crying out for a luxury sports coupe/crossover, with or without a finely chiseled jaw. Acura won props for style and spirit with the ZDX, but few buyers—triple digits per year, reportedly.