Strange as this may seem, the future of Honda 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.
DESIGNED BY COMMITTEE
Inside Honda, in both Japan and the US, 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 US carmakers 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.
That approach looks good on a spreadsheet, but it also carries the risk of a backlash. Consumers can turn on a debased version of a popular car and the resulting publicity can burn a brand - a lesson GM, Ford and Chrysler all learned the hard way in the slide to crisis in 2008.
BATTLE FOR HONDA'S SOUL
Now behind the scenes, the battle for Honda's automotive soul is being played out in places like Asahi and Minami's sprawling third-floor studio in the Tokyo suburb of Wako.
Since September, when they were promoted to fix Honda's car designs, Asahi, 47, and Minami, 44, have been working from Wako with a mission to shake things up. Both worked in the early 1990s on the fourth-generation Accord, a bigger Honda that won praise for its simplicity and a near-indestructible four-cylinder engine.
“He hates doing what he's told to do,” Asahi says of his partner with approval. “Just like me.”
Minami says it's a struggle to get Honda's designers to shed a conservatism born of the consensus-building approach typical of Japanese corporate culture. “I want designers to be heard at the company, but for that I need them to stop playing nice and compete more fiercely with each other,” he said.
OUT OF FAVOR
“Playing nice” has already taken a toll on Honda.
Last year, Consumer Reports magazine savaged the redesigned Civic for a low-quality interior and choppy ride. It dropped the car from its recommended list and ranked it next to last among 12 compact sedans tested. It was the first time the Civic had failed to make the list since the buyer's guide was launched in 1993.
As a brand, Honda lost its coveted top spot in the magazine's annual report on quality this week.
Honda is rushing a redesigned Civic to market late this year, essentially a facelift to protect the image of a car that is key to both Honda's future and heritage. -Reuters