The Honda Super Cub

Last spring, I bought a Honda Super Cub from a dealer across town (that town being Sendai, Japan). It had fewer than 10,000 kilometers on the odometer — not much — but I was still concerned about driving it off the lot and, before reaching home, having the engine issue a telltale puff of blue smoke signaling that it had burned up. And so I asked the dealer about a guarantee.

A smile came to his face, and he said, "Just make sure it has oil in the crankcase. It only holds about a half liter. If it has oil it will run forever."

Six months later I haven't put another drop of oil in the thing, and not one puff of smoke has come out of the chrome exhaust. If I don't ride it for a couple of weeks, I have to give the engine a few more kicks to get it started. When I ride it regularly, one does the trick. Once, the chain rattled against the chain guard. It took the dealer less than 10 minutes to make the adjustment.

Reliability wasn't the real issue; what I should have been more concerned about was making my way along Japanese highways with trucks rumbling past my ear, and navigating serpentine back alleys through an obstacle course of unforgiving concrete utility poles. To date, I have avoided a trip to the hospital by watching how the Japanese handle traffic, particularly the deadly right hand turn: by turning left, popping a U-turn inside the crosswalk, and waiting for the signal to change. (Traffic in Japan flows on the left side of the street.)

No such life-saving techniques are needed for those motorcyclists who have crotch rockets pulsating between their legs. For them, the Honda Super Cub — with its plastic leg protectors and step-through frame — is something to sneer at. They would be even less impressed by the way it handles. It sort of wallows to a start and tracks around curves like a box on wheels. It can't lay a patch of rubber or even climb a hill any steeper than a wheelchair ramp unless in first. Its distinctly unpowerful gears are shifted downward, no clutch necessary. A fourth punch down puts the bike in neutral, perhaps to head off impulsiveness.

But for people who just want to get to their destination economically — and many Japanese do — the Cub is the bike to get. (A new Cub lists for 165,000 yen, or $1,500; a used one can be picked up for half that.) The Cub averages 65 miles to the gallon and is so reliable and economical to operate that the Japanese postal service uses it (and a Yamaha knock-off) to deliver the mail. Businesses use it to deliver everything from ramen noodles to the morning paper. Waiting for a light at any given corner, odds are you'll see one purr by. Were the Cub somehow to disappear from its streets, the entire nation of Japan might come to a standstill.

Though it is now seen as a quaint throwback to a simpler time, in 1958 the Honda Super Cub represented a break with small motorcycle tradition. Rather than relying on a flimsy two-stroke engine that belched out blue smoke and had to have oil mixed in with the gas, Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Co., dropped in a sewing-machine quiet and clean 50cc four-stroke. To make the Cub easy to get on and off, he put the gas tank under the seat, hence the step-through frame. He then added the Cub's trademark leg protectors.

His vision paid off. Since 1958, Honda has stamped out 35 million Cubs and exported them to more than 160 countries. Though originally produced only at Honda's Sayama plant in Saitama prefecture north of Tokyo, the cycle now rolls off production lines in The Philippines, Thailand, India, Brazil, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and Indonesia, where more than one million Cubs were turned out in 2001. In Indonesia, where the Cub is the only means of private transportation for many people, some versions feature a longer seat capable of accommodating a father, mother and two small children.

In 1959, Cubs were shipped off to the United States. The advertising slogan that followed, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda," changed the image of motorcycling in the American psyche, an image defined until then by B movies about Hells Angels-type gangs. Bikers in leather, their hair streaming in the wind, were soon sharing the road with students, attorneys and housewives.

Although no longer exported to the United States, the Honda Super Cub primed the world's most prized market for a profusion of Japanese motorcycles, then cars, that soon had complacent American producers playing catch-up.

All these years later, Honda's cutting edge hybrid car technology could once again have the Big Three sitting in the backseat.

— James Roth (j dot roth dot mail at gmail dot com)