Honda Wants Back To Old Glory - In A Hurry

Honda will bring back an extinct car. In April, Daihatsu killed the last surviving topless kei car. And now, Honda wants to bring it back. This is what Honda CEO Takanobu Ito intimated to me – and a large room full of other reporters – this morning at the Honda HQ in Tokyo. His company will also launch the second generation NSX, will give you a new Civic Type-R for you to Euro-trash while it tries to achieve its goal of becoming the fastest front-wheel-drive vehicle on the Nurburgring. Wait, there is more.

Some allege that Honda has lost the plot compared to its innovative ways of the 90s. This morning in Tokyo, Honda CEO Takanobu Ito explained how Honda wants to go back to its clever roots. Ito is a man in a hurry.

He wants to bring models to market fast. Currently, rolling out a car worldwide did take Honda up to four years. And other carmakers it can take much longer as they still shove outdated tooling to lesser markets like cast-off clothes. Honda wants to launch its cars concurrently in all parts of the world.

For that, cars will be designed concurrently, or, as Ito said, “each region will participate in product development concurrently and at the same level from the earliest stages of development.”

Cars will also be deployed concurrently. Says Ito:

“Currently, rolling out a new model around the world takes two years. If you add another model, we need to give it a one year rest first, then spend another two years. Done the old way, rolling out three models globally would take at least four years. We have been able to shorten this to about half.”

The new concurrent system starts with Honda’s bread & butter car, the new Fit to be launched in 2013, followed by the Honda City and a new small SUV model.

Ito set himself and his company an ambitious goal. He wants to raise global sales to more than 6 million units in 2016, that’s “almost double its current global car sales,” as an impressed Yoko Kubota of Reuters said.

The topless Kei-car won’t contribute a lot of volume towards that 6 million goal, Ito reckons:

“The sports kei market is not large. We already have a product called Beat. To tell you the truth, it was a very difficult business to continue, and it did not contribute significantly to our overall business.”

The pocket roadster will be built nonetheless, because Ito believes ”that our customers would like to see those products.” See, yes. When it comes to buying, rational thinking will kick in, and an NBOX will be sold, or so the Honda calculation goes.

The 6 million goal is even more audacious as Honda is “very much struggling in Europe, and the difficulties are not going to go away soon,” says Ito. In China, Honda plants are back on-line after having been closed during last week’s riots. However, says Ito, “there is a bit of an impact with parts suppliers.” Meanwhile, components from Japan and elsewhere are sitting in customs, waiting for clearance. “We are receiving information that the customs clearance times are getting longer,” Ito said.