Conservative Honda shocked the world when it unveiled a fashionable, high-performance, two-seat roadster on the auto-show circuit two years ago, a charmer called SSM, for Sport Specialty Model.
With Mazda selling the Miata, and BMW and Porsche about to launch roadsters, the SSM caused a stir, not just for its smart looks but also for its 225-horsepower, 4-cylinder engine.
The same company keeping the $88,000 NSX sports car a well-guarded secret was toying with the emotions of those wanting a $30,000 roadster carrying the honored Honda name.
That same conservative Honda brought another vehicle on the circuit, a little sport-utility dubbed the CR-V, whose claim to fame was that in a world of $30,000 to $40,000 sport-utes, here was a vehicle that would sell for $20,000 or less.
Guess which vehicle conservative Honda gave its production blessing to? (And if you chose the SSM, your vote doesn’t count.)
But now comes word from Honda officials that there may be life in the SSM. CR-V was the logical choice at the time because sport-utes were more popular than sport coupes, but the SSM’s time has arrived.
“It will be expensive and would only be built in limited numbers,” said Tom Elliott, executive vice president in charge of auto operations for American Honda.
One reason for the high production cost is that the concept is built on a unique platform and not shared with other Honda vehicles to help amortize the cost.
“But back in Japan, Honda officials want to build the roadster,” said Elliott in an interview here at the preview of the automaker’s ’98 Accord.
“It would be a nice car for the Honda image, and the thinking is that it would be a nice anniversary car for us,” Elliott said.
“We could sell it as an Acura (Honda’s luxury division) or as a Honda.”
Honda is celebrating 50 years since opening its doors in Japan. In that time it has moved from selling only motorcycles and scooters to include automobiles and mini-vans.
Elliott said the only holdup is that some Honda executives question “how many two-passenger sports cars the market needs.” But, he said, in June 1998 Honda marks its 50th year “and they are looking at the SSM as an anniversary car.”
Elliott said it is more likely that it will be called a 1999 and come out shortly after the June celebration. But better late than never.
Stay tuned.
Right choice: OK, so Honda isn’t losing any sleep over its decision to put the CR-V sport-ute into production before the SSM. CR-V is going gangbusters.
“When we brought it to the Chicago Auto Show, we forecast sales of 25,000 units a year, perhaps 30,000,” Elliott said. “We’ll sell 75,000 this year, the same next year, and that number is limited only by our production capacity. It’s been a summary success.”
Honda is capacity-constrained in Japan as well as in North America–for the time being.
A plant being built in Ontario will start producing a new front-wheel-drive Honda mini-van for the 1999 model year, and sources say that plant might be able to handle some CR-V production as well.
Build up: Speaking of capacity, sources said the Acura TL, replacement for the Vigor built off the Accord platform, will be added to the Marysville, Ohio, lineup for 1999, shifting output from Japan. The Acura CL coupe, built off the Civic platform, is being built in Ohio.
Go figure: Elliott said Honda figured as long as the ’97 Accord was the last of the old breed and a new model was coming for ’98, better to reduce output of the old model than get stuck with excess inventory.
Wrong.
“We shorted ourselves in the first quarter of the year and had to import 20,000 Accords from Japan to recover,” he said.
“We won’t have the capacity to beat Camry,” he said of the race between Accord and the Toyota Camry to be the top-selling car model in the U.S. this year. (The Ford Taurus has held that title for the last five years, but Camry is poised to capture it because of increased production.) “But we’ll still have two cars in the top five, Accord and Civic, and that’s pretty good,” he said.
“But watch Camry tumble next year because they’ve added production of their new Sienna mini-van to the Kentucky plant,” Elliott said.
For 1998, Honda will sell only U.S.-built Accords in the U.S. because the model made in Japan is different. “They have a narrower body in Japan that we can’t import here,” Elliott said.
Missing in action: If you look long and hard, you still won’t see the Honda del Sol or the Accord station wagon for 1998. Both were dropped.
The two-seater del Sol from the Civic line because it didn’t sell; the Accord wagon because nearly all output was being exported to Japan. Though the wagon is gone, the new Honda mini-van is coming soon. Honda still must decide what to do with its Odyssey mini-van then.
Odyssey looks more like a station wagon, the upcoming mini looks more like a van. Chances are Odyssey would stay for a short time until enough of the new mini-vans are being produced to have ample supplies available at dealerships.
Shut and shut: To thwart thieves, Honda beefed up security in the ’98 Accord. It redesigned its doors and windows to make it virtually impossible to slip a Slim Jim in to unlock the car.
Slim Jims, thin metal rods slipped in the door to open the lock, are the tool of choice of thieves. They also are the tool of choice of police departments to help motorists get into cars in which they’ve locked the keys.
If you intend to buy a ’98 Accord, better invest a few dollars more and acquire a rack of spare keys.
Sue far: Honda has sued billionaire Wayne Huizenga’s Republic Industries in a bid to stall his attempts to buy Honda dealerships.
“We want to slow them down,” said Richard Colliver, executive vice president in charge of sales for American Honda.
“They’ve got eight Honda dealers under contract (to sell their stores) and want 50, which is 5 percent of our distribution. There’s some fear they (Republic, which runs the AutoNation used-car superstores) could dictate supply and price and already are talking about volume discounts (based on the number of vehicles they buy from the factory).
“That 5 percent of distribution is putting too much distribution into one basket too soon. We say, `Hey, you’ve never been in the car business before. Run some stores for a while before you expand because the biggest danger is that you fail,’ ” Colliver said
Output input: Koichi Amemiya, president of American Honda, said the automaker’s goal is to be producing 900,000 vehicles in North America by 2000 and selling at least 1 million units annually in the U.S. then.
That’s a significant increase from production of 790,000 units and sales of 843,000 units today.
And it typically takes weeks for an automaker to reach capacity when bringing out a new model.
Honda boasts it holds the industry record of 35 days when it brought out the 1996 Civic but will top the record with the ’98 Accord–from no cars an hour up to 1,750 a day in 20 days. You might call it productivity.
