Classic shrine: American Honda Collection Hall

By Charlie Calderwood

| 14 Feb 2025

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.

Clockwise from top: inside the American Honda Collection Hall in Los Angeles; the folding motocompacto e-scooter is a new product; 1960s ’bikes

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.

The tiny 1964 Honda E40 generator was sold with a Sony TV (left); the Honda Cuby training engine was just 19.7cc and was never sold to the public (right)

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.

This rare Honda Civic estate illustrates the Japanese marque’s growing model range in the 1980s (left); first- (on right) and second-generation Honda Preludes

Long waiting lists for Civics encouraged diversification; the Accord arrived in 1976 – represented here by a ’79 model – and annual US sales hit 185,000 by 1980.

An extremely rare second-generation ’81 Civic Wagon 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.

The Acura brand was shrewd marketing, soon imitated (left); the 1986 Acura Integra was a US hit

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.

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.

’Bikes on the ramp include a 1981 CBX1000 Super Sport (left); Honda’s turbocharged V8, as used in the Reynard 96I IndyCar

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.

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

On an adjacent lift and barely clearing the ceiling is the Sports Car Club of America racer of the late Bob Boileau Jnr.

One of American Honda’s 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 recorded 173mph at Talladega Superspeedway in 1976.

A third-generation Honda Civic (left) and Mk2 Accord (right) sandwich an original CRX Si

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

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 Torrance.

Acura then took things up a notch with the NSX and Integra Type R, both employing the famous VTEC (Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control), while the collection loops back to the Civic Si with an outstandingly clean, unmolested 1999 coupé, now iconic among the Fast & Furious generation as one of the defining models of the tuner-car era with its VTEC-equipped B16A engine.

Old meets new in the American Honda Collection Hall (left); 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 in the English-speaking world, this is a motoring experience you might not expect find 20 mins from Los Angeles International Airport, but it’s a real treat if you can get there.

Images: Max Edleston