In a production run so far of 63 years, more than 100 million examples of the Honda Cub have rolled off the production line, making it the record holder for any motor vehicle, and by a long way.
As much as the common perception was of the Honda Motor Company being autocratically run by Soichiro Honda, it was, at least in the early days, a double act. Honda was first and foremost an engineer, and the burgeoning organisation needed a strong guiding hand on the marketing side. That guiding hand was Takeo Fujisawa, and to him fell the responsibility of sorting out the myriad aspects of primarily keeping the company afloat as Japan’s economy headed inexorably towards recession, as well as planning the expansion necessary for survival.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Honda’s main thrust was the production of small capacity two-stroke engines, supplied to numerous companies to be attached to bicycles, as well as powering Honda’s own motorcycle, the 98cc Dream. Fujiwara reasoned that the next big step was the production of a new-generation four-stroke, and by July 1951 they had one – the 146cc Type E Dream. Working with Soichiro on the design was a young engineer, Kiyoshi Kawashima, who had graduated from the Hamamatsu Institute of Technology in 1948. The first road
