Honda In Struggle To Regain Its Soul - Car Guys Fighting Bean Counters For Control
 Car Guys Vs. Bean Counters (In Japan This Time) |
SEE ALSO: Honda Buyers Guide
But First Snide's Remarks: I would have thought that Honda's board after watching Detroit's Big Three's Bean Counters win the battle but lose their war, de-bean Honda to prevent financial executives from cutting corners on vehicle content in order to shore up margins. As simple rationality dictates, to get back on track, give manufacturing control to the "car guys", the engineers who built Honda into a world-wide powerhouse. Oh well, I guess the yen for profits at the risk of poor quality and decline in long term reputation has no national or societal borders..
TOKYO/DETROIT, March 2, 2012; Chang-Ran Kim and Ben Klayman writing for Reuters said that the future of Honda Motor Co may rest with a pair of contrarian Japanese car engineers working from a drab Tokyo suburb with a hotline to the boardroom. Their mission: just say no.
Honda's creative directors Toshinobu Minami and Yoshinori Asahi are out to kill any mediocre car designs rumbling down the pipeline. In short, they have been told to stop anything like the 2012 Civic, a cheapened redesign that prompted critics, consumers and rivals to wonder how Honda had so badly lost its way.
Inside Honda, in both Japan and the United States, that same question has also been asked with urgency. Honda, many say, slipped into designing cars by committee in recent years and drifted away from the iconoclastic ambitions of its founder. Honda had become boring.
"Somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to express ourselves more freely," Asahi told Reuters. "We have a lot of designers here, and when we ask ourselves, 'Which Honda car would we want to buy?' Sometimes, some of us draw a blank."
That's a startling admission at a company long praised for the quality and durability of its vehicles -- a company that caught U.S. automakers flat-footed in the 1970s with inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars like the original Civic.
Touted four decades ago for its CVCC engine that boasted cleaner tailpipe emissions -- as well as inspiring the Civic name -- Honda has trailed with advances such as six-speed transmissions and direct fuel-injection systems.
In recent years, Honda's "car guys", the engineers that built the automotive upstart into a powerhouse, were overshadowed by the "bean counters", financial executives more willing to cut corners on vehicle content to shore up margins, insiders say.