Honda Cub: The greatest machine ever
JAMES MAY: The Honda Cub is a thing of beauty and long may it endure - throw it in a canal, come back in 10 years, and you can still ride it to work
Fully loaded: Honda's all-conquering 50cc workhorse Photo: Gari Wyn Williams / Alamy
A while back, America’s Discovery Channel conducted a series of destructive tests on a Honda Cub motorcycle, rather in the vein of the films we made at Top Gear on the Toyota pick-up. They drowned it, blew it up, set it on fire, ran over it and generally tried to suppress its dogged, willing spirit, but by the end of it all the Honda still worked. They therefore declared it the greatest motorcycle ever made.
Well, I’ve been riding a 50cc Honda Cub – for quite a distance, in fact, but more of that some other time – and I think they got this wrong. I’d like to declare the Honda Cub to be the greatest machine of all time; nay, the single most influential product of humankind’s creativity.
There are other contenders, I know. The cathedral at Chartres or the mosque in Damascus; the complete works of Shakespeare; the modern art movement and the Maxim machine-gun. All these things reworked the picture presented by the tapestry we call the human condition, but none so much as Honda’s people’s motorcycle.
Let’s look at the figures. In the last 50 years, more than 60 million Cubs have been built in 15 countries, making it a best-seller to make other best-sellers look like mere fads. But it’s more than that. Most will have had several owners, and in Asia many of them will be transporting three or four people at a time. It’s therefore conceivable that a body of humanity the equivalent of America’s population has been granted its freedom by a single-cylinder step-through runabout. Liberating armies rarely achieve that.
It’s not a big motorcycle, as the Beach Boys were quick to point out*, just a groovy little motorbike. But what Honda achieved with an engine capacity equivalent to that of a miniature of whisky has to be experienced to be believed. In fact I’m beginning to think that owning a Cub is a rite of automotive passage, like driving a supercar with a dog-leg first gear and changing the cylinder head bypass hose on an old Mini.
There are just three gears and a centrifugal clutch, so that idiots can ride it within minutes. Because it was designed for poor people in rural Japan, it will go anywhere. Second gear is a town-biffabout ratio, third is for the cruise, where you might achieve 40mph. But first is so low that the Cub will climb Fuji. It will do this slowly, maybe at not much more than walking pace, but do it it will, even with a fridge on the back. Honda sold you a 50cc bike but gave you a mountain.
I’ve said before that when you ride a small Honda you do so with the grinning ghost of company founder Soichiro Honda on the pillion seat. On the Cub you can sense the way his genius imbued the machine; in the way the air filter is raised out of the harmful influence of the dust and water of unmade roads, in the proportions of the wheels and tyres and the softness of the springing, in the way the one-piece plastic leg shield can be replaced in a minute when you fall off. Even the range of nut and bolt sizes used to hold the thing together seems to have been considered. Honda didn’t just save you money on fuel, he saved you money on spanners as well.
I believe, too, that Honda knew that Cubs would never be maintained properly, because a Cub will still work when everything on it is technically broken. As a two-wheeled institution the Cub will probably never die, and as an individual bike it won’t either. You can throw one in a canal, leave it for 10 years and then fish it out and ride to work. It even looks good in brown.
What I love most of all though is that, Beach Boys apart, the Cub has never been glamorised. Unlike Italy’s Vespa it has never enjoyed the association with film stars and celebrities, the adoption by gurus of social commentary, the elevation to the status of “design icon”. It has simply carried on quietly doing its job better than everything else, its rightful and modest function unobscured by the fug of fashion. It is a thing of humble beauty that will endure forever.
Vacant plinth, anyone?
* In ‘Little Honda’, 1964
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