Here's an interesting article that appears in today's NY Times... here's the link if you want to check out the slideshow featuring one awesome photo of the 750 and a cute little cub:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/automobiles/12honda.html?_r=1&hpwFor Honda in America, 50 Years of Going Its Own DirectionBy JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN
Published: July 9, 2009
AFTER 50 years in the United States, the Honda name has blended into the culture alongside Sony, Nestlé and Adidas, another foreign brand now embraced as a reliable provider of high-quality, well-conceived products. That is a noteworthy achievement for a company that made its name selling a puny plastic-clad motorcycle just as Detroit’s was birthing its most flamboyant whales.
By the time Soichiro Honda died in 1991, the company he founded dominated racing around the world. More Photos >
For a broad swath of American consumers, Honda — a brand applied not only to cars and motorcycles but also to generators, lawn mowers and anything else the world’s largest engine maker could power — is the maker of unpretentious good stuff at accessible prices. Usually without flashy or distinctive styling, Honda’s products can be said to define the leading edge of ordinary.
It is an unlikely position for a company that, had it complied with collusive Japanese business traditions and paid heed to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, would be stuck in obscurity making piston rings.
“When you look at how Honda was born, it was basically told it couldn’t enter the motorcycle business,” said John Mendel, executive vice president for automobile sales at American Honda. “And that it couldn’t enter the automobile business. But it has pushed against all those things.”
That rebellious streak can be traced back to the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda, the eldest son of a blacksmith. Born in 1906, Honda apprenticed in auto repair shops before opening his own garage in Hamamatsu, Japan, in 1928. In a 1964 interview in Newsweek, Honda said that the business “became famous as a wild shop, for my geisha parties and antics.”
Parties aside, Honda’s passion was racing. He bolted a huge Curtiss-Wright V-8 aircraft engine into a car chassis and used it to set a Japanese speed record. His own competition days ended with a wreck in 1936; he promised his wife he would stop racing and concentrate on business.
That concentration led, in 1937, to the establishment of his piston ring factory (supplying Toyota, among others). The factory was a casualty of World War II, but Honda, whose only assets were rubble, regrouped to open the Honda Technical Research Institute in 1946. He began experimenting with small engines, and after two years purchased war-surplus 50 cc generator engines and mounted them to bicycles.
The motorized bicycles were a hit, Honda reorganized his operation as the Honda Motor Company Ltd., and development of a 1949 Dream D-Type, the first true Honda motorcycle — began.
By 1952 Honda was building efficient, relatively quiet four-stroke engines, and by 1954 Soichiro Honda was visiting the famed Isle of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle race in Britain and plotting his conquest of it.
Knowing that opportunities for his company’s growth inside Japan were limited because it was not part of the large trade combines, Honda decided to take on its toughest export challenge first: the United States. Starting with a storefront on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, American Honda Motor Company came to this country with small motorcycles that seemed ill suited to prevailing tastes. After all, most of the available bikes were Harley-Davidsons or British-built Triumphs and Nortons, with a dribble of Moto Guzzis and Ducatis from Italy.
There was also a matter of public opinion: the dedication required to maintain bikes of that era limited ownership to a relatively small demographic, often regarded as young men known for their black leather jackets and snarling demeanors.
So Honda attacked with niceness. Honda’s larger Dream and Benly bikes couldn’t compete against the British alternatives, but the Super Cub (called the Honda 50 in America in deference to Piper Aircraft’s trademarks), faced little competition.
With its step-through design and molded plastic body panels, the Honda 50 looked too toylike to attract the socially maladjusted. Its quiet 49 cc (that’s three cubic inches) four-stroke engine claimed a modest output of 4.5-horsepower.
It was a product for which Honda could recruit dealers; by 1961 there were 500 across the country selling the $249 bike. And Honda backed them with a clever ad campaign built around the slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.” Suddenly motorcycling was a hip and happy thing to do instead of a menacing ride along society’s margins.
By 1964, when the Hondells released the hit single “Little Honda” (written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys), the Honda 50 was an icon and its maker was entrenched in America, selling more than 100,000 motorcycles a month globally. More than 60 million have been made altogether and it is still in production on four continents.
With many motorcycle racing championships under his belt, Honda felt ready to build cars. There were impediments, though: the trade ministry had legislation pending to bar any new Japanese companies from entering automobile production; existing cartels had effectively sewn up domestic distribution; and Honda didn’t know how to produce cars.
Even so, Honda directed the company to develop a small sports car and dedicated its engineering resources to developing Formula One racecars.
In 1963 the company built 136 examples of its first production four-wheeler, the diminutive S500 sports car powered by a 4-cylinder 531 cc engine with chain drive to the rear wheels.
And in 1964, the Honda RA271 Formula One racecar made its debut at the German Grand Prix powered by a transversely mounted, 1.5-liter V-12 that would scream to an unheard-of 12,000 r.p.m. In October 1965 Richie Ginther gave Honda his first Formula One win with a victory at the Mexican Grand Prix.
Rule changes made Honda’s 1.5-liter Formula One cars obsolete for 1966, and Honda turned its attention back to motorcycles and cracking the car market. The result was two seminal products in 1969: the advanced CB750 motorcycle and the 600 sedan. The CB750 redefined the heavy motorcycle market while the 600 became the first car that Honda officially exported to America.
The 2-cylinder 600 sedan and its follow-up, the 1971 600 coupe, did not result in many sales but it did help establish the Honda auto dealership network in America and prepared the way for the more refined, 4-cylinder Civic that came in 1973, just as OPEC was shutting off the oil flow.
That fortuitous timing resulted in overwhelming success for the Civic, and Honda followed it up in 1976 with the larger, even more successful Accord.
From there Honda’s presence in America expanded exponentially. In 1979 it followed rival Kawasaki and opened a plant in this country to build motorcycles. In 1982 Honda opened a second assembly plant alongside its motorcycle plant in Marysville, Ohio, and began churning out Accords. By 1984 the company was building lawn mowers in North Carolina and opening its first North American research facility, in California. Two years later it started Acura, the first Japanese luxury division.
By the time Soichiro Honda died in 1991, the company he founded dominated racing around the world, its Accord had been America’s best-selling car and it was producing the Acura NSX that Motor Trend proclaimed was “the best sports car the world has ever produced. Any time. Any place. Any price.”
Honda has made some boneheaded decisions through the years. But engineering innovations like the Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion engine design of the 1970s helped establish Honda as an engineering leader. It met federal emissions regulations without the need for a catalytic converter — something competitors said was not possible. Its pioneering commitment to designing and building products where it sells them has become standard operating procedure for rivals like Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. And its future includes robotics and the $3.65 million HondaJet business aircraft.
Honda’s products are not likely to show up on the lawn at a concours d’élégance unless it’s to mow it. They are taken-for-granted companions in our daily lives, not so much collectibles as they are persistent, comfortably familiar and usually reliable. They may not be classics, but they’ve earned some affection.
