CHICAGO, USA - Fifty years after Honda got its US start selling motorcycles off the back of a pickup truck, the Japanese automaker is one of the most popular and top-rated car companies in the United States.
"The meticulous way they've grown and focused this company over the 50-year period is certainly something to marvel at," said Jeff Schuster, an analyst with JD Power.
Just 11 years after its founding as a motorcycle company, Honda launched its first overseas subsidiary in the United States on June 11, 1959.
The Japanese government limited Honda's investment to 250,000 dollars, of which only half could be taken out of the country as cash, because it was convinced the effort would fail.
So Honda bought an old photo studio in Los Angeles as a base and sent its eight associates off in Chevy pickups to pitch their bikes to local hardware stores and motorcycle shops.
The bikes were a lot smaller than the massive "hogs" Americans were used to seeing growling down the road under the grip of tough guys in leather jackets.
But a massive advertising campaign with the slogan "you meet the nicest people on a Honda" helped reshape how Americans looked at motorcycles.
By 1968 Honda had sold a million of them, and had become the best-selling motorcycle in the country.
Honda entered the US car market a year later, selling a handful of its diminutive sedans in Hawaii before launching on the mainland in 1970.
Sales were initially weak, but Honda's fuel-efficient engines and low price tags proved far more popular when the oil crisis hit in 1973.
Honda became the first Asian automaker to set up production in the United States, with the first motorcycle rolling off an Ohio assembly line on September 10, 1979 and the first car built on November 1, 1982.
The plants were built at a painful time in US labor history and there were significant doubts as to whether quality standards could be maintained.
Those fears were soon proved to be baseless and in 1988 Honda began exporting the US-built Accord to Japan.
A year later, the Accord became the first foreign brand to be the best-selling car in the United States, a title it would hold for three consecutive years.
Honda's "strong engineering culture" has played a large part in their success, said Jeremy Anwyl, president of the automotive research firm Edmunds.com.
"They were able to meet some of the early fuel efficiency and emission standards without some of the inelegant solutions others found," he said in a telephone interview.
The focus on efficiency extended beyond their engines and influenced both their manufacturing operations - among the first plants to adopt flexible systems able to produce different vehicles on the same assembly line - and their management structure.
"They're able to make decisions really quickly and aren't encumbered by the bureaucracies other automakers have," Anwyl said.
While Honda was criticized for failing to capitalize on the massive trucks and sport utility vehicles trend in the 1990s, its focus on core products and smaller car-based crossover sport utility vehicles proved prescient when gas prices skyrocketed again.
That focus on efficiency allowed Honda to quickly adjust its production when auto sales crashed last fall, said John Mendel, Honda's vice president in charge of US sales.
"Honda really prospers in difficult times," Mendel told AFP.
"Customers go to safe harbors - they know with a Honda vehicle they're probably never going to have any problems with it, it's going to last a long time and the residual value is going to be high."
Honda's share of the US market rose to 10.8 percent of the US market in 2008 from 9.6 percent a year earlier even as sales fell eight percent to 1.6 million vehicles, according to Autodata.
And it is currently on pace to overtake Chrysler for the number four spot in the US market, just as Toyota overtook Ford for the second rank.
Honda now employs some 28,000 people in the United States, where it operates 10 manufacturing plants and 14 research and development facilities.
