Inside the amazing American Honda Collection Hall

By Charlie Calderwood

| 6 Jul 2026

Classic & Sports Car – Classic shrine: American Honda Collection Hall

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.

Inside the American Honda Collection Hall in Los Angeles

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.

The tiny 1964 Honda E40 generator was sold with a Sony TV

Honda motorcycles, not cars, provided the first foothold for the marque in the United States of America.

That all changed with the twin shocks of the 1970 Clean Air Act and then, a few years later, the 1973 Fuel Crisis.

Honda’s 1975 update to its Civic model introduced the first engine to meet US emissions standards without the need for exhaust-strangling equipment, the ‘Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion’ E-series.

Long waiting lists for Civics then encouraged diversification.

The Honda Accord arrived in 1976 – represented within this collection by a ’79 model – and annual American sales hit 185,000 by 1980.

This rare Honda Civic estate illustrates the Japanese marque’s growing model range in the 1980s

An extremely rare, second-generation Civic Wagon from 1981 showcases the rapid expansion of the Honda range, which included the Prelude from 1979.

Hoping to deflect calls for protectionism, the company opened its first American factory in Marysville, Ohio, in 1979.

It initially produced ’bikes, but also cars from 1982: the second-generation Accord in the collection represents the first Japanese car built in the USA.

Rivals from back home – Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Subaru – all followed suit, but Honda demonstrated its intimacy with the Stateside market again when it launched Acura four years later.

The 1986 Acura Integra was a US hit

To Honda what Mercury was to Ford, the Collection Hall’s 1986 Legend and Integra both hail from the new marque’s debut year.

Within three years, Toyota and Nissan had done the same with Lexus and Infiniti.

Acura also prompted American Honda to up its racing efforts, keeping motorcycles and open-wheelers under the Honda name, but all closed-wheel racers became Acuras.

Mugen parts were distributed from 1985 to encourage grassroots motorsports, as Acura and Honda tackled IMSA and IndyCar separately.

The 1992 IMSA GTP/Lights class-winning Acura-Spice sits beside ’90s IndyCar victors and below a ’97 Integra Type R, the latter a World Challenge Touring Car class winner from 1998-2002.

Honda’s turbocharged V8, as used in the Reynard 96I IndyCar

On an adjacent lift and barely clearing the ceiling of the buillding is the Sports Car Club of America racing car piloted by the late Bob Boileau Jnr.

One of American Honda’s very first employees, Boileau swapped his Mini Cooper for a Civic 1200 in 1974, and campaigned it for the following 12 years, winning an impressive six class titles among fields of MG Midgets and Abarth Fiats.

Bob claimed that the Civic could run all day at 10,500rpm – and he recorded 173mph at Talladega Superspeedway in 1976.

Meanwhile, back on the road, Honda offered a growing portfolio of sporting vehicles to its American consumers.

The modified Honda Civic 1200 campaigned in Sports Car Club of America events for more than a decade

The CRX Si unveiled the entry-level sporting trim that has featured on Honda’s American products since 1985, soon joined by the Civic Si that sits alongside the CRX in the Torrance museum.

Acura then took things up a notch with the NSX and Integra Type R models, both employing the famous VTEC (Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control).

Meanwhile, the collection loops back to the Honda Civic Si with an outstandingly clean, unmolested 1999 coupé, now iconic among the Fast & Furious movie franchise generation as one of the defining models of the tuner-car era, powered by its VTEC-equipped B16A engine.

2009 Honda S2000 CR, Insight and 250,000-mile CR-V (left-right)

There are later, more prosaic vehicles on show, too, including a 1994 Accord Coupé and the groundbreaking Insight, the first hybrid sold in the USA.

Carl Pulley, the expat Brit who manages the collection, picks out a surprising favourite, a 1999 CR-V: “People ask me, ‘Why would you have a car with 250,000 miles in the museum?’

“But it looks so good. It showcases Honda’s durability and reliability.”

Relocated in September 2023 to a purpose-built mini-museum attached to the welcome hall of its US headquarters, the American Honda Collection is open to the public on weekdays and as part of monthly Cars, Bikes & Coffee gatherings on the firm’s campus.

A second-generation Honda Prelude with pop-up headlights greets visitors to the American Honda Collection Hall in Los Angeles

Around half of the cars are stored in another facility, with sections of the collection displayed on rotation.

Easily the broadest public exhibition of Hondas on show in the English-speaking world, this is a motoring experience you might not expect to find 20 minutes from Los Angeles International Airport.

But it’s a real treat if you can get there. Plus, admission is free.

Images: Max Edleston