The Motorbike Archives

The Great Honda Vending Machine says nothing, feels nothing, leaks nothing; it tolerates no flies in the gas tank, no flaws in the paint, no frivolities, no error, no humanity. The Vending Machine has neither soul nor passion; the machine simply produces.

You've read it a hundred times and sensed it between the lines of road tests and features. The caricature has become a standard fixture in the motorcycle industry. It's a lie.

Honda is not an out-sized vendor/computer run by bionic automatons. The Japanese do laugh. At the heart of Honda's corporate empire lies Honda Research and Development, Ltd. Of course there are banks of computers, all kinds of telemetry devices, recorders, decoders, transmitters, emission laboratories, and so on. But the hardware is not the message; the hardware does not create. People do. Engineers generate ideas, investigate possibilities, struggle with designs, debate alternatives, and hammer projects into shape. At its creative center, Honda is like any other enterprise: human inspiration and perspiration.

Honda is a company strong on engineering, particularly engine design. Indeed, Honda's success was built on solid engineering, not some fancy advertising two-step. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Honda developed bullet-proof little four-strokes; nothing short of a sledge hammer could demolish those original 50cc Honda engines. Honda followed suit by building larger four-stroke engines which ran hard and didn't break. Hondas also had modern, reliable electrics everything worked, and kept working. Other Japanese manufacturers soon offered hassle-free electrics. but Honda dominated because Honda had the engines, when and where it counted. On the street, where the money was and still is, the engine people gave consumers their best shots: 350/400s. 500/550s and 750s. Finally Honda's competitors got the message and began building machines on the Honda pattern. Enter the Universal Japanese Motorcycle. Suddenly Honda has a lot of company.

What will—or can—Honda do? In the short run, you'll at least find updated Honda 750s with more power and better suspensions. Sensational changes. the kind of Great Leap that leaves everyone gaping, may be a couple years away. No one outside Honda R & D knows which way or exactly how far the company will be jumping. And Honda R & D isn't telling.

Dreaming the impossible dream is routine business at Honda R & D. And a vital necessity. At base the creation of new motorcycles begins with human inspiration—an idea inside some engineer's head. Market researchers don't thunder down the halls of Honda R & D, waving statistical evidence demonstrating what motorcyclists in Peoria will buy. Rather, the first question at R & D is: what can Honda build? That's the sort of question designer-engineers ask. Quite different is the starting point of the market-analyst: what does the consumer want and what will he buy?

Mind-tripping at the drafting table is heady stuff. The designer can visualize motorcycles undreamed of in Peoria. The consumer, the designer might argue, will always give market pollsters unimaginative responses because the public generally sees 1979 motorcycles as extensions and refinements of 1977 machines. Designers define a specific task more broadly than consumers. When, you might ask, will Honda build cast wheels? But that's not a question a designer would ask; he might inquire what kinds of nonwire-spoke wheels could be produced. That question admits far more possibilities than cast alloy wheels. And when you see Honda's clever wheel, comprised of pressed steel spokes. you'll understand that Honda R & D made a broad-ranging investigation of non-wire-spoke wheel technology.

Dreaming the impossible dream—and making it happen—is also a dangerous game. A company can literally build a motorcycle which is a monument to its engineering expertise but which no one in Peoria. or any place else, wants. Suzuki, for example, has done it both ways. Rotary-engine motorcycles are really a response to a designer's question—what can we build? On the other hand, the GS 750 answered the marketing question—what do they want and what will they buy in Peoria?

When you work from the drawing board to the marketplace, you better have a brilliant team at the boards, dreaming sellable dreams. If their creative energy goes flat—or off in the wrong direction—the company will be on its knees, and then on its belly. Honda is no different than some small Italian factory where one good man hip-shoots from his drafting table. In the end, both organizations utterly depend on human genius.

The key men at Honda R & D are comparatively young. Typically. they're in their thirties, and the senior heavy-hitters are in their forties. Almost all these men have been with the company from 12 to 20 years. In the Japanese tradition they have spent most of their working lives at Honda. Mr. Soichiro Honda, the company's founder who retired in 1973, gathered a bright young group of people around him as his operations grew and prospered in the 1950s and 1960s. The people are still there—and still young. Mr. Honda, spritely in his seventies, now carries the title of "Supreme Advisor."

Soichiro Honda left more than talent behind. He built an organization which would provide a constant flow of new-product designs. In 1960 Mr. Honda pulled his research and development group out of the parent firm, Honda Motor Company, and established Honda R & D as an independent company. R & D's principle is "to supply our inseparable partner, Honda Motor Co., Ltd., with blueprints created by utilization of our unique organization for high level research over a wide field and by a free use of our own individualities and talents." Essentially, R & D does new-product research and development and refines existing products. Honda kept the R & D group independent of the parent company's budget planners by financing R & D at 2.5 per cent of the gross turnover of the parent company. While this system maintained the distance between R & D men and the corporate parent's accountants, the profit-basis feature kept the idea men in touch with reality. The think-tank for brain-trusters could not become a playpen: bright ideas were to lead to commercial profits.

What happens to Bright Ideas at Honda R & D? Suppose a design engineer believes he has a way to make rotary valves—as opposed to poppet valves—practical in four-strokes. This creative individual makes a proposal to a review committee, whereupon the need for such a project must be justified and verified. If the evidence on hand strongly suggests that the world is not waiting for a rotary-valve four-stroke or water-cooled boxer engine or a non-wire-spoke wheel or whatever, the proposal dies there. But with the need verified, the project goes forward—and the instigator assembles a project team of his own choosing.

Somewhat later, there's another hurdle which must be cleared. The project task-force must demonstrate to a steering committee that the proposal is technically feasible to produce. Not so incidentally, at Honda R & D the decision makers are engineers themselves. The President of Honda R & D, Ltd., Mr. Kiyoshi Kawashima, for example, did not rise to the top because he was a shrewd accountant. On the contrary, Honda R & D is very much an engineer's club. And that's entirely reasonable inasmuch as you must have engineering talent just to exercise judgment at R & D.

Perhaps the task-force, after a promising start and encouraging stretch, finds itself up a blind alley. Then the fellow who proposed and organized the study must decide if the project has become untenable. There may be only one percent success in the research level, and much that Honda R & D learns in pure research can't be applied immediately, so the research material goes on file.

When a project reaches the D-stage, the Development phase, failures aren't tolerated. What goes into development must come out as a working item. Finally there's a P-stage, for Production, and this involves research related to putting the new product into mass production.

There's more action than just new-product development at Honda R & D. Since there appears to be no ossified bureaucracy, task-force teams can be marshalled to deal quickly with a specific task. Consider the Honda 750. It's an eight-year-old motorcycle, under attack in the market place from above (Kawasaki Z-1), on its flanks (Suzuki 750) and below (Kawasaki 650). So in November 1975, Honda R & D decided to develop an F2 Super Sport, and by August 1976 the project was complete—the most thorough-going revision of the Honda 750 in its history.

The engine now redlines at 9500 rpm, and produces five more horsepower than last year's F1. Typical of Honda, the horsepower increase resulted from carefully orchestrated changes in the carburetion (new Keihin pumpers), reshaped combustion chambers, different valve timing, and a new exhaust system. Furthermore the restyled F2 has a revised suspension, with more damping at both ends of the motorcycle. And the F2 benefited from another Honda R & D project which had been cooking for two years in the research stage and six months in the development phase: the pressed-steelspoke wheel.

Honda R & D impresses the visitor with the speed with which complicated projects can be carried to completion. Still, Honda can't work overnight, and it's clear that R & D's main efforts have been focused on automobiles in the recent past.►