Honda Super Cub
The Honda Super Cub is an underbone motorcycle manufactured and marketed by Honda, featuring a four-stroke single-cylinder engine ranging in displacement from.
In continuous manufacture since 1958 with production surpassing 60 million in 2008, 87 million in 2014, and 100 million in 2017, the Super Cub is the most produced motor vehicle in history. Variants include the C50, C65, C70, C90, C100 and it used essentially the same engine as the Sports Cub C110, C111, C114 and C115 and the Honda Trail series.
The Super Cub's US advertising campaign, You meet the nicest people on a Honda, had a lasting impact on Honda's image and on American attitudes to motorcycling, and is often used as a marketing case study.
Development
The idea for a new motorcycle was conceived in 1956 when Honda Motor's Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa toured Germany and witnessed the popularity of mopeds and lightweight motorcycles. Soichiro Honda was primarily the engineering and production leader of the company, always with an eye towards winning on the racetrack, while his close partner Fujisawa was the man of finance and business, heading up sales and formulating strategies intended to dominate markets and utterly destroy Honda Motor's competitors. Fujisawa had been thinking about a long term expansion strategy, and unlike other Japanese companies, they did not want to simply boost production to cash in on the recent economic boom in Japan. A small, high-performance motorcycle was central to his plans. Upwardly mobile consumers in postwar Europe typically went from a bicycle to a clip-on engine, then bought a motor scooter, then a bubble car, and then a small car and onwards. Fujisawa saw that a motorcycle did not fit in this pattern for the average person, and he saw an opportunity to change that. Soichiro Honda was at the time tired of listening to Fujisawa talk about his new motorcycle idea; Honda came to Europe to win the Isle of Man TT race and he wanted to think about little else.Fujisawa and Honda visited Kreidler and Lambretta showrooms, as well as others, researching the kind of motorcycle Fujisawa had in mind. Fujisawa said these designs had "no future" and would not sell well. His concept was a two-wheeler for everyman, one that would appeal to both developed and developing countries, urban and rural. The new motorcycle needed to be technologically simple to survive in places without up-to-date know-how and access to advanced tools or reliable spare parts supplies. The common consumer complaints of noise, poor reliability, especially in the electrics, and general difficulty of use would have to be addressed. Because Honda was a large company growing larger, it needed a mass-appeal product that could be produced on an enormous scale. The design had to be sorted out before production began because it would be too costly to fix problems in the vast numbers that were to be manufactured. The scooter type nearly fitted the bill but was too complex for developing countries to maintain, and the small wheels did poorly on badly maintained or nonexistent roads. Another of Fujisawa's requirements was that it could be ridden with one hand while carrying a tray of soba noodles, saying to Honda, "If you can design a small motorcycle, say 50 cc with a cover to hide the engine and hoses and wires inside, I can sell it. I don't know how many soba noodle shops there are in Japan, but I bet you that every shop will want one for deliveries."
Once interested, Soichiro Honda began developing the Super Cub on his return to Japan. The following year Honda displayed a mockup to Fujisawa that finally matched what he had in mind, Fujisawa declaring the annual sales would be 30,000 per month, half again as many as the entire monthly two-wheeler market in Japan. His goal was to export motorcycles on a scale yet unseen in the economic disorder of postwar Japan when most companies halting trade efforts were handled through foreign trading companies. Honda would have to establish its own overseas subsidiary to provide the necessary service and spare parts distribution in a large country like the US. To this end American Honda Motor Company was founded in 1959. In 1961 a sales network was established in Germany, then in Belgium and the UK in 1962, and then France in 1964.
The Honda Juno had been the first scooter to use polyester resin, or fiberglass reinforced plastic, bodywork, and even though production of the Juno had stopped in 1954 as a result of Honda Motor's financial and labor problems at the time, Fujisawa continued to encourage research in polyester resin casting techniques, and these efforts bore fruit for the Super Cub. The new motorcycle's fairing would be polyethylene, the most widely used plastic, which reduced weight over FRP, but Honda's supplier had never made such a large die cast before, so the die had to be provided by Honda. The Super Cub was the first motorcycle ever to use a plastic fairing. Motorcycling historian Clement Salvadori wrote that the plastic front fender and leg shields were, "perhaps the Cub's greatest contribution; plastic did the job just as well as metal at a considerably lower cost." The technology developed in the Isle of Man TT racing program was equally vital to the new lightweight motorcycle, making possible from a 50 cc four-stroke Honda engine, where the first engine the company built a decade earlier, a "fairly exact copy" of the 50 cc two stroke war-surplus Tohatsu engine Honda had been selling as motorized bicycle auxiliary engine, had only a output. Honda's first four-stroke, the 1951 E-type, had just a little more power than the Super Cub,, with nearly triple the displacement,.
To make the new motorcycle, Honda built a new ¥ factory in Suzuka, Mie to manufacture 30,000, and with two shifts, 50,000, Super Cubs per month. The factory was modeled on the Volkswagen Beetle production line in Wolfsburg, Germany. Until then, Honda's top models had sold only 2,000 to 3,000 per month, and observers thought the cost of the new plant too risky an expenditure. Edward Turner of BSA went to Japan to see the motorcycle industry in September 1960, and said that investments the size of the Suzuka plant were "extremely dangerous" because the US motorcycle market was already saturated. When completed in 1960, the Suzuka Factory was the largest motorcycle factory in the world and was a model for Honda's mass production facilities of the future. The economies of scale achieved at Suzuka cut 18% from the cost of producing each Super Cub when Suzuka could be run at full capacity, but in the short term Honda faced excess inventory problems when the new factory went into operation before the full sales and distribution network was in place.
Design
The Super Cub has been compared to the Ford Model T, Volkswagen Beetle and the Jeep as an icon of 20th century industry and transport. The C100 used a pressed steel monocoque chassis, with the horizontal engine placed below the central spine, a configuration now called the "step through" or "underbone" motorcycle. By some criteria, the type of motorcycle the Super Cub falls into is difficult to classify, landing somewhere between a scooter and a motorcycle, and sometimes it was called a moped, "", or scooterette.The plastic fairing ran from below the handlebars and under the footpegs, protecting the rider's legs from wind and road debris, as well as hiding the engine from view. This design was like the full enclosure of a scooter, but unlike a scooter, the engine and gearbox unit was not fixed to the rear axle. This had several benefits. It moved the engine down and away from the seat, detaching the rear swingarm motion from the drivetrain for lower unsprung weight. It also made engine cooling air flow more direct, and made it possible to fit larger wheels. Placing the engine in the center of the frame, rather than close to the rear wheel, greatly improved front-rear balance. The fuel tank was located under the hinged seat, which opened to reveal the fuel filler inlet. The 17 inch wheels, in comparison to the typical 10 inch wheels of a scooter, were more stable, particularly on rough roads, and psychologically made the motorcycle more familiar, having an appearance closer to a bicycle than a small-wheel scooter.
The pushrod overhead valve air-cooled four-stroke single cylinder engine had a bore × stroke, displacing, and could produce at 9,500 rpm, for maximum speed of, under favorable conditions. The low compression ratio meant the engine could consume inexpensive and commonly available low octane fuel, as well as minimizing the effort to kick start the engine, making the extra weight and expense of an electric starter an unnecessary creature comfort. Though some of the many Super Cub variations came with both kick and electric start, the majority sold well without it. Even the latest 2011 model year Japanese domestic market Super Cub 50 and Super Cub 110 versions, with modern technology and conveniences like fuel injection and a fuel gauge, were not offered with an electric start option.
The sequential-shifting three- or four-speed gearbox was manually shifted, but clutchless, without the need for a clutch lever control, using instead a centrifugal clutch along with a plate clutch slaved to the foot-shift lever to engage and disengage the gearbox from the engine. While not intuitive to learn, once the rider got used to it, the semi-automatic transmission, "took the terror out of motorcycling" for novice riders. Unlike many scooters CVTs, the centrifugal clutch made it possible to push start the Super Cub, a useful advantage if the need arose.
The early Super Cubs used a 6 volt ignition magneto mounted on the flywheel, with a battery to help maintain power to the lights, while later ones were upgraded to capacitor discharge ignition systems. The lubrication system did not use an oil pump or oil filter, but was a primitive splash-fed system for both the crankcase and gearbox, with a non-consumable screen strainer to collect debris in the engine oil. Both the front and rear brakes were drums. On both the front and rear wheels were 2.25" × 17" wire spoke wheels, with full-width hubs.
Honda recommended daily checks of the lights, horn, tire pressure, brakes, fuel and oil level, and a weekly check of the battery electrolyte level. The new engine break-in maintenance was done at, requiring adjustment of the valve tappets and contact breaker points, and an oil change, and the rider was advised to stay under for the first. Every the spark plug needed cleaning, and the chain adjustment checked, and every an oil change, breaker point check, and valve adjustment was due. At, major maintenance was due, requiring the removal and cleaning of the carburetor, drive chain, exhaust silencer, and wheel bearings. The rider closed a manual choke to aid in starting at cold temperatures. By the standards of the day, this was a simple motorcycle, with minimal maintenance demands, and it earned a reputation for high reliability.