Soichiro Honda Biography

When Honda was still a child, he had a dream. He dreamt that one day he would own a car. And scarcely had he ever assumed that one day he would not only have a car, but also become one of the giants of car industry. Honda was predetermined by the destiny to influence the automobile and motorcycle industry like no one else in the history.

His contribution was the drastic change of both the products and the entire market of its. He was the person responsible for construction of motorcycle that became so well-spread and popular among the people so is led to appearance of a new vast market segment. The products of Honda were constructed both for men and women, plus they fitted the middle class that was seldom targeted by manufactures.

The strengths of Honda were technical elegance, stylish design and market intuition. He didn’t have an engineering background or experience, since he only completed 8 grades. He knew nothing about marketing, finances and distribution; being a child of agrarian Japan he didn’t have a notion about big business and international trade. He reached success despite of Zaibatsu Japanese conglomerates who considered him an outsider and an insurgent. His success was stunning not only for Japan, but also for Germany that occupied a big part of car market and for America that possessed most of the rest markets.

The elegant solutions Honda suggested for complex problems, based on following the simpler ways. This approach was also peculiar to other great innovators of the world. He didn’t obtain an education and didn’t realize all the technical nuances that allowed him follow the trial-and-error way that was also used by, for example, Edison. By the beginning of 80ies Honda became the third among the greatest car manufacturers of Japan; by the end of 80ies he was occupying the third place on world car market. In 60ies he already dominated motorcycle production (70% of the market) and by the 1990ies he produced over 3 million motorcycles monthly and still keeps 60% of the world market today. That was quite good for a person with 8-grade education who had a dream and enough determination to make this dream come true. George Gilder considered Honda “The most outstanding, brilliant and successful industrialist in automobile production after Henry Ford.” British Sandy Times wrote in its automobile survey of 80ies wrote: “The appropriateness of Honda’s technical solutions, similar to the jeweler’s works, astonished every car engineer I ever encountered.”

Honda accomplished just another “impossible” breakthrough by proving the specialists that they were wrong stating that the American workers could not assemble a high-quality car on Japanese level. In mid 70ies he built a factory in Marysville, state Ohio and dispelled this myth by producing a car fitting perfectly the quality standards of Japanese car industry. Exactly this car – Honda Accord became the best-seller American car of 80ies and still kept its ...