Soichiro Honda, founder of the eponymous Honda Motor Co. Ltd., relished the grind of a tough task. His maxims reflect it.
"If we are going to make cars, the road we take should be the hardest," he famously told one team in the early 1960s. Their task was no small feat: Honda expected them to build a winning Formula One race car despite the fact they knew little about auto racing and a few staffers had to ask what Formula One was. It had only been two years since the company had put a sports car – the S500 – on the road. Honda declared the edict, nonetheless.
The result (a few failures and then, in 1965, a win with the RA272 No. 11 car) is on display at the Honda Collection Hall here. Via self-guided tours over three storeys, the Hall offers a glimpse into Honda's hard-driving, passion-propelled origins in a building chock full of gleaming relics – from farm tillers to scooters and open-wheel race cars – that form the footholds of the auto maker's careful evolution into a brand that blends excitement with utility and dependability.
A mid-1980’s Honda Civic featuring wood panelling and a hatchback.
In keeping with Honda's theme, though, the road to get here is not easy. Anchored in a glassed-in corner of the Twin Ring Motegi campus, which hosts both an amusement park and racetrack, the Collection Hall is about 150 kilometres north of Tokyo. You can get here fastest via a winding combination of public transit – subway to bullet train and then onto a bus, car or taxi – but a visit requires a deliberate, out-of-the-way trip. It is not the kind of museum one haphazardly comes across while plodding through the various sites of Tokyo. Located in what one Honda employee likened to the Kansas of Japan, the Collection Hall forces visitors through a rural expedition of sorts. The packed density of Tokyo gives way to lush fields and rice paddies sprawled on either side of two-lane highways. Every now and again, there is a truck stop anchored by a 7-Eleven. Farmers in straw hats traverse side roads and pathways by bike.
The 1947 Honda Model A was a 50cc, two-stroke rotary valve engine to be mounted on bicycles. It was also the first mass-produced product to carry Honda’s name.
It's a fitting backdrop to showcase Honda's humble beginnings, which aimed to lighten the workload and improve the lifestyles of working-class people in war-ravaged Japan.
Soichiro Honda's first target was his wife, Sachi, who struggled to run daily errands on her bicycle, then Japan's main mode of transportation. Honda came up with the idea of converting a small engine to power her bike – his first production engine was actually designed to power two wheels, not four. The 1947 Honda Model A was a 50 cc, two-stroke, rotary-valve engine to be mounted on bicycles. It was also the first mass-produced product to carry Honda's name.
The mid-1950s and ‘60s saw Honda invest heavily in scooters, including the Monkey Z100, front left, which was designed for kids’ amusement park rides.
It was a smash success and Honda, a 34-employee company, was officially launched. Several iterations of those early auxiliary engines are on display at Motegi in a hall that also contains some of the company's early amusement-park rides. The Monkey Z100 looks like a blast for the five-year-old set, but must have terrified their parents in the years it evolved into a real production motorcycle (it, too, is on display for the eye-popping pleasure of parents).
The early 1950s saw Honda plunge headlong into technology, despite a crippling recession in Japan. Buoyed by its founder's aim to "be the best in the world," Honda produced farm equipment that would reduce the back-breaking labour in the form of an agricultural tiller. The company forged ahead with its bicycle-engine technology and introduced Juno, an "all-weather" scooter. Packed with new technologies, Juno was lauded for its progressiveness: It was one of the first motorcycles with a push-button start, had a dashboard modelled after a car and a large windscreen.
Sales were sluggish, though, and production was halted. Despite his aspirations, Honda was neither ashamed nor discouraged by production failures. Evidence of this is seen throughout the Collection Hall, where it is clear motorbikes and four-wheeled vehicles served as mobile laboratories atop which Honda intended to build at any cost. Technology that showed up in one discontinued model would be improved on for later production.
Signs that the company took pains to uniquely market its early wares are everywhere. To counter the outlaw image motorbikes had in the United States in the early 1960s, Honda launched a campaign built around the slogan, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda." Images showed kerchief-wearing women toting flowers, neatly packaged parcels and even children. Honda's bikes and scooters, adorned with female-friendly touches such as flowered seats, white baskets and painted in pastels were standout symbols of fun and freedom.
Beneath its playful, carefree image, Honda was feeding off new challenges, particularly big ones. It was natural, then, that the motorcycle maker would begin to tinker with making its own cars – a major undertaking. "I'm not interested in competing with existing makers; I want to make something completely new," Honda told his teams.
The T360 mini truck was Honda’s first four-wheeled production vehicle.
In 1963, five years after the company began work on cars, Honda debuted the T360, a four-cylinder 360 cc minitruck with 30 horsepower (the engine was mounted mid-ship under the floor). Compact and cutesy, a powder blue version of the T360 sits at the entrance to the second-floor showroom here; across from it is the bright red S500. Billed as "the sports car that stunned the world," the S500 was Japan's first sports car. With a compact, 531 cc liquid-cooled, four-cylinder engine, the car was a model of advanced racing technology. Its peak power output? "An astounding" 44 hp. More shocking was the fact the car was bright red – regulations back then prevented the use of red paint in non-fire vehicles. Honda went with it anyway; when the car's big brother, the S600, was introduced in 1965, its red was a deeper shade. Gleaming and unblemished, both cars are on display in Motegi.
The N360, Honda’s first attempt at a four-passenger family vehicle, maximized interior space.
Beside them, in cream paint with a sloped roof and round headlights, is an ancestral Honda that paved the way for the passenger cars Honda is best known for today. The N360 was Honda's first attempt at producing a family car. With wide-set wheels and a front-drive system that maximized interior space ("man-maximum/machine-minimum" was the guiding principle of its development), the 31-hp, two-door vehicle was Japan's bestselling car in its class for a short while after its release.
The 1973 Honda Civic CVCC, the car that would launch Civic Nation, featured an efficient engine that beat competitors working to meet strict U.S. emissions regulations.
It was the car that came after it, though, that made Honda a star. The Civic was introduced in 1972; by 1973, Honda had installed a revolutionary, low-emission CVCC (compound vortex-controlled combustion) engine, making it the first company to comply with the United States' stringent new exhaust-emissions regulations.
Needless to say, the popularity of the Civic soared. With it, so did Honda Motor Co.
A 1982 concept designed to appeal to youthful urban dwellers, the Honda City came with an attached scooter.
The Collection Hall in Motegi is rich with samples of Hondas past and present, from bicycles to trucks, passenger vehicles and racers. If you like things that move – either with two wheels or four – this is an excellent place to explore outside of Tokyo.
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.
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