HONDAS DECK THE HALL

The Japanese firm's Los Angeles collection is now on public display for the first time in two decades

- CHARLIE CALDERWOOD

Headquartered in Tokyo and having raced in Formula One in a white-and-red livery, Honda is as Japanese as a Samurai riding a giant anime cat-but its meteoric post-war rise owes almost as much to California as to its homeland. It's at the American Honda Motor Company's Torrance headquarters, just south of Los Angeles, where the company tells the story of its rapid Stateside expansion through 84 cars, a clutch of motorbikes, a handful of generators and a model of a jet aeroplane.

Just one year after launching the milestone Super Cub motorcycle - and before it had built a single four-wheeled vehicle - Honda set up its first overseas subsidiary on West Pico Street, Los Angeles, in 1959. Its advertising campaign - 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda' didn't just sell tens of thousands of motorbikes to Americans, it changed the genre's image, with college students, housewives and delivery drivers getting on 'bikes for the first time.

A 1965 Honda S600 starts the four-wheeler story in the Collection Hall. The original S500 was never officially sold in the USA, but was Honda's debut passenger car. The first that did make it there, a 1970 N600, sits alongside.

Its 45bhp air-cooled 598cc motor, good for 40mpg, was impressive in 1970, but few Americans were interested in the superbly packaged little city car. Honda motorcycles, not cars, provided the first foothold in the USA.

That all changed with the twin shocks of the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1973 Fuel Crisis. Honda's 1975 update to the Civic introduced the first engine to meet US emissions standards without the need for exhaust-strangling equipment, the 'Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion' E-series. With it, Honda's sales volumes surged, as the Civic proved far more efficient and reliable than the cars of an American auto industry that had previously never cared about fuel economy.