To understand how much difficulty Honda is in today, you need to imagine the ecstasy of working as an engineer for the company in late 1964: the year of the Tokyo Olympics, of the first bullet train and of Japan’s global arrival as a speeding, soaring symbol of the future.
You spend your days in a unique new R&D centre built to enshrine the idea that the company is led by you, the free-spirited engineer. The prototype of your company’s first family car is secretly nearing completion. The Honda RA271 has just competed, for the first time, in a Formula 1 race at the Nurburgring. The Beach Boys are in the charts with a song — Little Honda — celebrating the supreme sexiness of your motorcycles.
Now picture a Honda engineer in early 2026, with car sales faltering in key markets and the company in visibly poor shape. Engineers were informed in March that they would be moving back into a reconstituted R&D centre, chaotically reversing the company’s decision to scrap it in 2020. China’s humanoid robots are dancing, somersaulting and running on the world stage but in 2018 Honda ditched the Asimo project that pioneered this exact technology. Honda’s much-anticipated return to Formula 1 for the current season has been, so far, humbling.