Facts about Honda
Only the daring make it to the top and clearly this is evident in the life and story of Honda Company. Sochiro Honda, who lived from November 17, 1906, to August 5, 1991, was the founder of Honda. Perhaps from destiny or mere curiosity, the young Sochiro had a natural flair for automobiles. His history is traceable to when he worked as a young automobile repairer in a tuning shop in Art Shokai Japan. He was famed to have increased the speed of cars and used them in races, one of which was piston design with the intention of selling it to Toyota. Even though the first draft was not accepted, but was not enough to deter the young engineer that had an unstoppable drive. It is said that he was able to give up everything to get his design accepted such that he even went back to school and at a time gave away the jewelleries of his wife to obtain some money to aid his research. His doggedness later paid off when Toyota gave him a contract to build a factory in order to produce pistons even though the factory was taken up in an earthquake later.
Honda had a little break, in the 1940s when the World War II caused a shortage in the supply of gasoline, Honda cars were not been used but being self propelled, it was said that he fixed a small engine to a bicycle to get through the period. The end of the war saw the building Honda Technical Research Institute in the city of Hamamatsu. The institute was to study the possibility of manufacturing small 2-cycle motor bikes. The success in that led to the invitation of shop owners, numbering about 18,000 to deliberate on how to rebuild ruins the war had left on Japan. This meeting gave birth to the famous Honda Cub, the first in the series of the Honda Motor Company, the world largest by 1964. The first automobile was a small pick up van known as T360 sold in 1963. In terms of the components of the pick-up, it had 4 gasoline engine possibility grouped as a cheaper Kei Car tax bracket. In terms of the car, the first to be turned out by Honda was the S500 later in the same 1963.
Honda is today one of the leading automobiles manufacturers in the world. They have been into automobiles, motorcycles, and internal combustion engines more than half a century ago. For the engines, their products are measured by volume yet the company turns out more than 14 million annually, a feat yet to be matched. Production wise, Nissan trailed behind Honda, just as it grew over Chrysler becoming the fourth largest car producer in the United States and today Honda is the proud sixth largest producer of automobiles in the world. The history of Honda came out in flying colors in 1986 when it launched Acura.
Besides the business of automobiles, Honda is also into marine engines, personal watercraft, garden equipment, power generators and other such products. The spirit of the period took the company into artificial intelligence otherwise known as robotics. Their research in that area paid off when ASIMO appeared in the year 2000. After artificial intelligence, came some researches in aerospace when they built GE Honda Aero Engines and few others still in the pipe line. Also see: Facts about Honda.
Facts about Honda
The official headquarters of Honda is located in the town of Minato, in the city of Tokyo Japan. As a multinational company, it is quoted in the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange among others.
As a conglomerate, Honda is assembled in places like Belgium, Canada, Pakistan, China, India, Thailand, Peru, and Turkey to mention but a few. However, the major assembling locations of Honda are Japan proper and America. In fact, it is estimated that in the last one year, more than 80 percent of Honda products used in the United States are assembled in that country, particularly in North American plants. There are new partnerships going on in different part of the world. For instance, in India there is Hero Honda Motorcycles and Honda Siel Cars. China hosts Guangzhou Honda and Dongfeng Honda just as we can find in Pakistan Honda Atlas. The Honda Company based in America is located however in City of Torrance in California but Honda Canada is in Toronto, Ontario even though the manufacturing outfit in that country is in Alliston, Ontario.
Despite the grounding economic situation in the world, Honda has continued to lead in the market. The economic crunch brought high fuel prices leading to many people abandoning their vehicles for the cost of fuelling it. But that was exactly where and when Honda spelt its superiority. Given the fact that Honda products has the best fuel economy in the automobile world, while the other companies were suffering cut down, Honda was smiling to the banks as the sales increased by one percent in the economic problem, in June 2008. Two years after, while Toyota and what is known as Detroit’s Big Three were suffering losses, Honda’s sales graph was still climbing higher and higher.
Honda’s fortune besides being traced to the usage low cost in terms of fuel and maintenance is also a function the nature of the assembling factories. The factories are made that they can easily be adjusted to give what is required at the moment. The company also has provisions to manufacture cars, trucks and other automobiles specially made for difficult places like Africa and many others. With good knowledge of the bad terrain in those parts of the world, Honda build’s in special features that makes the vehicles adapted to the environment. Honda and their arch rivals, Nissan and Toyota however also had their own share of the global economic breakdown. The impact of the situation though it did not affect their sales, it did affect their profit. The reason for this is that no company is an island in a global world.
Honda vehicles on the market today are reliable, safe and long lasting. Models that continue to stand the test of time include the Accord, Civic, Rav 4 and the very popular Odyssey.