CarBrandLogos archive · Honda · 1958

HondaSuper Cub

The most-produced motor vehicle in history, and it is still on sale.

Photo: Mj-bird · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Honda history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Honda Super Cub, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

In 1956 Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa toured Europe looking at mopeds, and came back convinced that everyone was building the wrong thing. The scooters were fragile, with small wheels that dropped into potholes, and the small motorcycles were dirty, noisy and demanded skills an ordinary person had no reason to acquire. What Japan actually needed, Fujisawa argued, was a machine a shopkeeper could operate in ordinary clothes, that would start every morning without ceremony, and that would cost roughly as much to run as a bicycle.

1972 Honda C70 · Billybong10 · Public domain

Design and engineering

What they produced in 1958 answered that brief with unusual precision. The frame was a pressed-steel spine with a step-through gap, so a rider in a skirt or work overalls could get on without swinging a leg over anything. Plastic leg shields, then a novelty, kept road dirt off. Seventeen-inch wheels, large for the class, dealt with the unpaved roads most of the world still had. The 49 cc horizontal single was a four-stroke at a time when almost every small engine was a smoky two-stroke, which meant no oil to mix into the fuel and no fouled plugs. Most importantly, the three-speed gearbox ran through a wet multi-plate centrifugal clutch with no hand lever, so gears could be changed with the left foot alone. The account that this was specified so a soba delivery rider could shift while balancing a tray one-handed is repeated so often because it describes exactly what the machine does.

1966 Honda CA100 Super Cub instruments · Audin Malmin from Seattle, USA · CC BY 2.0

In production

Home demand was immediate. The harder problem was America, where motorcycling carried a reputation for delinquency that no product improvement could address. Honda's answer was commercial rather than technical: the 1963 advertising campaign built around the line "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda" sold the machine to students, housewives and commuters who did not think of themselves as motorcyclists at all. It worked so thoroughly that it enlarged the American market rather than dividing it, and it gave Honda the dealer network and the reputation it later used to sell cars.

Early Honda 70 · Dennis Bratland · CC BY-SA 3.0

Legacy

Elsewhere the appeal needed no explaining. In much of Asia and Africa the machine became the basic unit of transport and of small business, carrying passengers, livestock and improbable loads, cheap enough to buy secondhand and simple enough to repair at the roadside with hand tools. It has been assembled in fifteen countries, and countless local competitors have copied the layout closely enough that the underbone became a category rather than a model. The design has been revised continuously rather than replaced, adding 50, 70, 90 and 110 cc variants, electric start, a four-speed box, front disc brakes on some versions and eventually fuel injection, while keeping the spine frame, the automatic clutch and the essential shape. Honda passed a hundred million units in 2017, a figure no other motor vehicle of any kind has come close to.

At a glance

The facts that define it.

Produced

1958–present

Engine

Horizontal 49 – 4-stroke air-cooled single

Technical specification

The Super Cub, in detail.

Production: 1958–present
Class: Underbone
Engine: Horizontal 49 – 4-stroke air-cooled single
Transmission: 3- or 4-speed semi-automatic transmission with wet multi-plate centrifugal clutch
Assembly: 15 countries worldwide

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