THIRD TRY’S A CHARM

Strapping into the original 2000 Honda Insight, I was never more certain about anything: This will be a hit.

The radically aluminum, slippery teardrop of a two-seater looked like an eye-catching cross between a Chiclet and a space pod dropped from Venus. In the end, a few engineering professors bought them—but there’s only so many of those—and then it quietly disappeared.

In 2009, I picked the second-gen Insight over the recently redesigned third-generation Toyota Prius in a battle of four-door, five-seat