Soichiro Honda

#1Soichiro Honda was already good with cars. Then he tried making parts for them.

#2That went badly.

#3In the 1930s, Honda submitted 50 piston rings for Toyota’s quality checks. Only three met the standard. A piston ring is a thin metal ring inside an engine, sealing the gap between the piston and cylinder wall. It looks simple. It isn’t. Get the material or dimensions slightly wrong and the engine suffers.

#4Honda had run into something he couldn’t solve by instinct.

#5That was unusual. He’d entered the Art Shokai auto repair shop in Tokyo at fifteen, learned under Yuzo Sakakibara, and was running the Hamamatsu branch while still in his early twenties. Broken cars made sense to him.

#6Mass manufacturing didn’t.

#7Repairing one machine meant figuring out what had gone wrong with that machine. Manufacturing meant making the same part correctly again and again, thousands of times.

#8So Honda went looking for what he didn’t know. He attended technical classes, visited universities and steelmakers, and dug into metallurgy and production methods.

#9He wasn’t after a diploma.

#10He needed the ring to work.

#11Eventually Tokai Seiki became a real parts manufacturer, supplying Toyota and others. It grew to roughly 2,000 employees.

#12Honda had finally built the kind of company he’d wanted.

#13Then the war tore it apart.

#14One Tokai Seiki plant was damaged by an air raid. Another collapsed in a 1945 earthquake.

#15Then Japan surrendered.

#16The problem wasn’t just rubble. The wartime industries buying Tokai Seiki’s products were disappearing too.

#17Honda could have spent years rebuilding the first company he’d fought so hard to create.

#18He sold what was left to Toyota instead.

#19Then he took what he called a “human holiday.”

#20For roughly a year, he stayed out of serious business. There’s no need to turn that blank stretch into a clever master plan. We don’t have evidence that he spent it secretly designing Honda Motor.

#21For once, the man who always seemed to be building something didn’t have a clear next move.

#22Then, in September 1946, he visited his friend Kenzaburo Inukai.

#23There was a small engine at the house, the kind used to power a radio generator for the Japanese military. The war was over. The engine’s original job was gone.

#24Honda looked at it and thought of something else.

#25A bicycle.

#26Postwar Japan already had bicycles. Cars were beyond the reach of most people, and materials were scarce.

#27So Honda took one of those surplus engines and attached it to a bicycle.

#28Then he asked his wife, Sachi, to try it.

#29She knew people would stare, so she put on a good pair of monpe trousers before riding through town.

#30She came back covered in oil.

#31Fuel had leaked onto her clothes.

#32Sachi pointed out the obvious: customers weren’t going to be happy if the machine did that to them.

#33So Honda went back and fixed it.

#34This wasn’t a polished motorcycle emerging fully formed from an inventor’s head. The moment a real person used it in real life, a flaw showed up.

#35Then another problem arrived.

#36There were only so many surplus military engines.

#37Once the stock ran out, Honda had to build his own.

#38The A-Type engine came in 1947. Honda Motor was founded in 1948. In 1949 came the Dream D-Type, a complete motorcycle with both engine and frame made by Honda.

#39Now he had a motorcycle company.

#40What he didn’t have was enough places to sell motorcycles.

#41Japan had only a few hundred motorcycle dealers at the time, and only around twenty carried Honda products.

#42A better engine wasn’t going to solve that.

#43The company was short on money too. At one point, wages had to be paid in installments.

#44That’s when Takeo Fujisawa entered the story.

#45Fujisawa wasn’t an engineer. He couldn’t design Honda’s engines.

#46What he could do was see the parts of the business Honda didn’t.

#47Money. Distribution. Customers.

#48Honda focused on products and manufacturing. Fujisawa focused on how those products would actually reach people.

#49Then he asked a useful question.

#50If there weren’t enough motorcycle dealers,

#51why sell only through motorcycle dealers?

#52In 1952, Honda launched the Cub F-Type auxiliary engine. Fujisawa sent direct mail to roughly 50,000 bicycle shops across Japan.

#53More than 30,000 responded with interest.

#54Honda had opened a sales network outside the traditional motorcycle business.

#55But that still doesn’t explain why Honda became Honda.

#56More than 200 motorcycle manufacturers entered Japan’s postwar market. And in 1955, Tohatsu—not Honda—held the largest share.

#57Putting a little engine on two wheels wasn’t the breakthrough.

#58What Honda did next mattered more.

#59In the early 1950s, Honda still depended heavily on outside suppliers. One company recollection put its in-house parts production at under 20 percent.

#60Honda could sell motorcycles before it could make many of their parts itself.

#61Soichiro Honda didn’t want to become the best assembler in Japan.

#62In 1952, the company decided to spend about ¥450 million on advanced machine tools from overseas. Its capitalization was around ¥6 million.

#63Those figures aren’t a clean modern measure of risk, but the scale is hard to miss.

#64Honda was buying the ability to manufacture at a different level.

#65Then Soichiro Honda went overseas and saw just how far away that level still was.

#66Europe shocked him.

#67He later described the realization as discovering he’d been a frog in a well, mistaking the little patch of sky above him for the whole world.

#68His response wasn’t to aim lower.

#69He found a harder benchmark.

#70The Isle of Man TT.

#71It was one of the great proving grounds of motorcycle engineering. Honda entered for the first time in 1959.

#72By 1961, Honda was winning in both the 125cc and 250cc classes.

#73One of those hundreds of Japanese motorcycle companies was now beating established rivals on an international stage.

#74And yet the machine that turned Honda into a giant wasn’t built for a racetrack.

#75It was built for everyday life.

#76In 1956, Honda and Fujisawa traveled through Europe looking at motorcycles and mopeds.

#77They didn’t want to copy what was already there.

#78Honda wanted a small four-stroke engine that was still a serious piece of engineering. The bike had to be easy to ride, easy to live with, and useful to people who didn’t think of themselves as motorcyclists.

#79That became the Super Cub.

#80Late in 1957, Fujisawa looked at the developing model and gave the team a sales number.

#81Thirty thousand.

#82People around him thought he meant per year.

#83He meant per month.

#84At the time, the entire Japanese motorcycle market was selling around 40,000 units a month.

#85One Honda model was supposed to approach the size of the whole market.

#86That number mattered because the product depended on scale. If Honda wanted something inexpensive, reliable, and sophisticated enough for ordinary people, it had to build a lot of them.

#87So Honda built a huge mass-production plant at Suzuka.

#88The Super Cub took off.

#89By 1959, Honda had become the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer.

#90A few years earlier, it hadn’t even been number one in Japan.

#91America didn’t go according to plan either. Some of Honda’s larger bikes struggled under the faster, longer-distance riding conditions there, while the little Super Cub drew interest from a different kind of customer.

#92Honda adjusted.

#93Advertising such as “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” helped move motorcycles beyond the rough biker image and into the lives of people who had never thought of buying one.

#94Honda had become a global motorcycle company.

#95So it chose to become a beginner again.

#96By the early 1960s, Toyota and Nissan were already established automakers in Japan.

#97Honda wasn’t.

#98There was also talk of reorganizing Japan’s auto industry in ways that could make new entry much harder.

#99If Honda wanted in, waiting could mean missing the opening.

#100So it moved fast.

#101Honda entered automobile production in 1963.

#102In motorcycles, it was a world leader.

#103In cars, it was the new kid.

#104And this time, one of Soichiro Honda’s old strengths started causing trouble.

#105He believed deeply in air-cooled engines. Instead of circulating liquid around the engine to carry heat away, they relied directly on air.

#106That approach had worked well for Honda in motorcycles.

#107So he pushed it in cars too.

#108The Honda 1300 became an ambitious expression of that belief.

#109A younger generation of engineers disagreed. Cars were getting more demanding, engines were larger, and emissions rules were tightening. Engineers including Tadashi Kume believed water cooling was the better path.

#110The argument got serious enough that some engineers worked on water-cooled research without Soichiro Honda’s approval.

#111Years earlier, young Honda had admitted that he didn’t know enough and gone out to learn.

#112Now the situation had flipped.

#113Young engineers were telling the successful Honda that he might be wrong.

#114Honda didn’t back away easily. He kept showing up at the research operation, pushing the technology he believed in and arguing with the engineers.

#115Then Fujisawa stepped in again.

#116Back when the company was small, Fujisawa had solved the sales and financial problems Honda couldn’t.

#117Now the problem was Honda himself.

#118He asked his longtime partner a question that cut through the argument:

#119Did he want to remain the company’s president, or did he want to remain its engineer?

#120He couldn’t keep controlling both.

#121Honda chose the president’s role.

#122The water-cooled engineers got room to move.

#123And almost immediately, they faced something much bigger than an internal fight over engine cooling.

#124America was imposing dramatically tougher emissions rules.

#125The 1970 Clean Air Act amendments demanded huge reductions in automobile pollution.

#126Even the biggest car companies in the world were struggling with the coming standards.

#127Honda was still a small automobile maker in the United States.

#128Its engineers started working on combustion itself.

#129That led to CVCC.

#130The idea was to make the fuel burn more cleanly and reliably inside the engine, reducing pollutants before they left it.

#131CVCC wasn’t Soichiro Honda’s solo invention.

#132It came from Honda’s R&D team, including people from the younger engineering generation willing to challenge the founder.

#133In 1972, CVCC passed U.S. EPA testing for the stringent 1975 emissions standards.

#134Honda had been making cars for less than a decade.

#135And it had just produced an answer to a problem that much larger automakers were still wrestling with.

#136General Motors chairman Richard Gerstenberg expressed skepticism that the system could work in the kind of large cars Americans drove.

#137Soichiro Honda heard about that.

#138Honda bought a Chevrolet.

#139It was a 1973 Chevrolet Impala.

#140A big American sedan.

#141Honda’s engineers didn’t shove a tiny Civic engine into it. They kept the Impala’s own V8 and designed new cylinder heads so the big engine could use the CVCC principle.

#142Then the car went back to the United States for EPA testing.

#143It passed.

#144The modified Impala met the 1975 emissions requirements.

#145Its fuel economy improved too.

#146There had once been a young manufacturer who submitted 50 small metal rings to Toyota and got only three through inspection.

#147Now engineers at the company carrying his name had taken a car from one of the world’s largest automakers and made its own V8 meet a standard that company leaders had doubted Honda’s technology could handle.

#148Toyota and other automakers later signed agreements to use Honda’s CVCC technology.

#149And then Soichiro Honda did something else.

#150He left.

#151In 1973, while CVCC was drawing attention around the world, Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa retired from active management together.

#152Honda didn’t stay on as chairman simply because he was the founder.

#153Fujisawa didn’t hang around either.

#154The company moved to another generation.

#155Nine years later, on November 1, 1982, a Honda Accord rolled off the line in Marysville, Ohio.

#156It was the first passenger car built in the United States by a Japanese automaker.

#157American workers were building it.

#158Soichiro Honda was no longer president.

#159Fujisawa was gone too.

#160Back in the 1930s, Honda had needed to go back and learn how to make a small metal ring well enough to fit inside somebody else’s car.

#161Now a company carrying his name was building cars in the middle of America,

#162without him.