Name: How Honda Is Trying To Be Cool Again
Uploaded: 2024-11-22T03:16:25.000Z
Duration: 15 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Toyota may be the biggest automaker in the world, but a smaller rival and sometimes partner has at times generated more buzz, Honda.

A company that got its start putting engines on bicycles became the biggest engine maker in the world.

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It has sold over 400 million motorcycles, supplied some of the most successful Formula One racing teams, and made sports cars that have rocked the automotive world.

For a generation of fans, it was one of the most innovative and interesting companies in the heyday of Japanese sports cars.

I remember the 80s and the 90s when Honda was really on top and it was really an exciting company.

But today, it confronts a totally different industry, one where tech is changing and new powers are rising.

The engines that Honda built perhaps better than anyone else are losing favor.

Is Honda walking away from one of their most appealing traits to benefit the brand or not?

We're going to find out the answer to that one way or another.

It's doing very badly in China and it's not so far making the transition to electric vehicles quickly enough.

It's hard to figure out what Honda offers that a Mazda isn't going to offer you, or Toyota is not going to offer you, or a Hyundai is not going to offer you.

So now, the company has a plan to carry it forward, but it could be a hard slog for even a legendary name.

Honda sells about four million vehicles globally, making it the seventh largest automaker in the world.

But what many may not know is that it makes a whole lot of other things.

For the fiscal year ending March 31st, the company sold 26.74 million units of cars, motorcycles, planes, boats, generators, yard equipment, and so on.

The vast majority of these products come equipped with engines, and that in many ways is what Honda is really best at, perhaps even the best in the world.

Some will say that Honda is a engine company beyond all else, not really even a car company, but an engine company, and making just stellar engines.

But really, I think they're a powertrain company.

Honda founder, Soichiro Honda, made the company's first product by attaching an engine to a bicycle.

The other characteristic that defined Honda was Soichiro's passion for motorsports, racing specifically.

About 12 years after it made its first engines, Honda began building Japan's first fully paved, full-scale racetrack.

It also entered the Isle of Man TT, one of the most famous and dangerous motorcycle races in the world.

By 1961, it dominated the race, sweeping the top spots in two different classes.

Honda was racing cars almost as soon as it began making them.

Just one year after it had debuted its first concept, it was already entering Formula One.

The year after that, it won an F1 race in Mexico.

Its engines have powered many winning drivers and teams, including Ayrton Senna, Jenson Button, and Max Verstappen.

Soichiro Honda's idea was that the tight constraints and extreme competition of racing would forge superior engineers.

Honda engineers produced crazy, wild, and influential inventions.

They came up with technologies like VTEC that extracted more horsepower out of small engines without the need for turbochargers.

When you look at the cars that Honda was producing in the 90s, they were so ahead of their time.

I mean, if you've driven a stick shift, variable valve timing engine, the VTEC that they had, it was like nothing else.

No other vehicle could kind of match that in terms of that precision.

A few models have been especially iconic.

The 80s and 90s were a kind of golden age for Japanese sports cars, with Honda right at the center.

The Honda S2000, a four-cylinder, two-seat roadster, became a collector's favorite.

The 2009 S2000CR, a top trim level, was originally priced at about $39,000.

In 2022, one was auctioned off with 123 miles for $200,000.

Even base S2000s have sold in recent years for far more than their original MSRP.

There was competitors that rode better, that were quieter, that were roomier.

It was just this powertrain that was just so incredible that you were okay forgiving everything else because it just made the car so enjoyable to drive.

I mean, they captured the enthusiast market, absolutely.

I mean, there was this whole import scene that almost stemmed from people modifying their Civics and their Acura Integras that just no one else, you know, I mean, you look at Mazda, who has always been sporty, never took off like that as the Hondas did.

Perhaps the most famous of Honda's high-performance cars was the Honda NSX, branded as an Acura in some markets, a supercar many would say better built than a lot of the big names for a fraction of the price.

It essentially reset the bar for performance in a category that most people would have never even thought Honda could, let alone would, compete in.

It's what happens when you chase a dream instead of the competition.

I said, you could almost hear frustration in the engineering rooms across Europe.

We had to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

They had not been challenged like that in decades.

And then all of a sudden, they had to all go back and reevaluate what it took to produce a capable sports car because the NSX kind of blew up everything they'd made up until that point.

The Acura NSX, which was really kind of the poster child for really what Honda could produce.

It was this engineering and skill, along with reasonable prices and a reputation for reliability, that propelled Honda.

Production peaked at 5.4 million cars in 2018.

As of 2023, the Honda CR-V was the fifth best-selling car in the U.S. and the third globally.

Four of the world's 25 best-selling vehicles were Hondas.

In 2024, Honda was polled as the seventh most recognizable brand.

If you look at CarDriver and MotorTrend and all these mainstream auto magazines, they've always ranked their cars very highly, often higher than Toyota or at least equal.

So I think engines are the heart of it, but it's not just that.

I think in the American market, which is probably their most important market from an auto perspective, they're a company with excellent brand equity, particularly on the Honda side, known for high quality, reliability, and a good fuel economy, and names like Accord, Civic, Pilot, and of course CR-V have done very well. 2023, as it was for many others, was a year of record profits.

Despite this, Honda faces a suite of challenges.

So I would say Honda is really kind of, you know, over the last couple of decades, is kind of searching to kind of find themselves.

In 2017, Honda's CEO admitted the company lost its mojo.

At the time, it was burdened by a spate of large recalls and a drastic drop in key industry rankings, such as J.D.

Management realized the company had been trying too hard to compete with bigger Japanese rival Toyota rather than focus on the R&D that made Honda great.

In 2024, some of Honda's biggest worries are rather new.

China, once a cash cow for global automakers, has become a much tougher market, especially for foreign brands.

But about a third of Honda's total volume is threatened.

So far in 2024, sales in the country have dropped by nearly 30%.

Other troubles are similar to those Honda battled nearly a decade ago.

Recalls, for example, including one for 1.7 million vehicles over steering defects.

Perhaps its biggest challenge is still recapturing that engineering mojo executives were talking about in 2017 and finding ways to stand out in a crowded and competitive field.

When it comes to just the most reliable, kind of conservative, you know, vehicles, that's Toyota.

Now, when it comes to, we want to make reliable vehicles and they're responsible, but also kind of like stylish and whatnot, we've got Hyundai really a serious competitor in there.

So I think it's been really kind of hard for Honda to really figure out who they are.

What I think was Honda's really kind of unique characteristic for years, decades, was what I call the FTD, the fun-to-drive factor.

And now you drive a modern Toyota and you drive it back-to-back with the equivalent Honda model.

And it's like, these things are about the same.

It's pretty much a raise or set advantage now.

And so that's hurt Honda's kind of one strong, you know, consistent claim that I think it had for decades on Toyota.

Acura, I think it's a good brand, a good product, but I think it's been a bit more stuck in the mud of, you're not quite luxury, but you're not really volume or mass market either.

I felt like Acura was supposed to be kind of the more driver-oriented brand for Honda and the more kind of personality-driven.

And I think that worked to some extent, but I think one of the problems is that there just wasn't enough differentiation.

In an era where all eyes are turning toward EVs, it does less good to be one of the world's best makers of something the world wants less and less of.

Now, the problem with Honda is that these incredible manual transmissions that were so smooth and enjoyable to drive, well, not many people are buying manual transmissions anymore.

And when you look at these incredibly efficient, high-revving engines that were very reliable, well, look what's going on in terms of powertrain.

How much more efficiency can you get out of a nice vehicle?

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How Honda Is Trying To Be Cool Again

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