[Dnick]

This is a false impression of what Ito has done: Ito has introduced the Earth Dreams engines and CVTs, built several factories around the world, is bringing turbos, the 8DCT debuted world-class hybrid tech, got Honda back into F1, is finally seeing HondaJet get off the ground - not to mention shaken up everything from design to parts procurement to R&D. If you don't like him that's fine but he's done anything but coast.

The key has been the (unwanted) shift in primary tenets that made Honda a great company... rooted with it's founder. In "the old days", Honda ALWAYS put pride of product before other fleeting competitive trends. More lately, the striving leaps of other mfgs has caused Honda to compromise those cultural tenets that kept them at the forefront of reliability and product stability.
You may not like that "stodgy" approach to building quality products, but THAT was what Honda had going for it more than anything else. Sometimes their styling has not been the most current, and frequently they have not been the first responder to consumer demands.... but they were frequently very successful in putting out a high quality, reliable product when all was said & done.
ITO was at the forefront of Honda Corporate leadership. It is at that level where those primary tenets are reinforced, changed, or abandoned. He might have done some good things tactically, but his strategic approach departed significantly from (if not abandoned) the foundation that made Honda great in the first place. It doesn't matter how many bells & whistles you include, or how fast you go, or what great styling you have.... if you don't have a foundation of quality/reliability. Just ask Chrysler, GM, etc. etc.

I'm glad to see him go, only to the point that they might return to those core values of getting it right in the first place. Remember "keep it simple"??? That's where they need to go. After that core tenet of getting it right, everything else is window dressing.

 

[Dnick]

I can't tell you how glad I am that Honda's corporate culture included that "board of elders" as it is. That is so reflective of what you might expect from the legacy of Soichiro Honda.... the ability to have the company self-correct, and to embed the kind of stability provided by such a board to realign the company when 'current' leadership strays to far afield from the foundation values upon which the company was built. Hopefully new directions will reflect old intentions.

 

[Dnick]

I remember seeing a video from about 10 years ago where an engineer said that the reason he went to go work at Honda was that the company let him build the best product possible.

Based on my experience with the Civic, Honda engineering was being second-guessed by the accountants. Which is exactly what went wrong at GM and Chrysler. They destroyed the company's reputation for short-term profits, a tenth of a cent at a time.

I agree about the airbag scandal. Ito gets a pass on that. Should Honda have done independent testing of a supplier's parts? They probably did at first during acceptance testing, but given how rare the issue is, it just never occurred where they could see it.

Chip H.

Agree that a bad supplier can undo anybody's best intentions, temporarily anyway... BUT the cover-up is a different story. Ito was ultimate leader & set the tone for quality .... not only of product design, materials, but also conduct. That cover up (the understated extent of air bag problem) was reflective of an atmosphere of deteriorating integrity & compromised values. THAT is on Ito.