Fun-to-drive Hondas are back!
"Honda's Plan to Stop Making "Watered Down, Uninspiring" Cars
Driving the new Honda Civic sedan for the first time, it felt like something was different. A few months later when we drove the new Civic Coupe, we got our confirmation. Fun-to-drive Hondas are back. In fact, if you drove both the 2012 Civic and the 2016 Civic back-to-back, you probably wouldn't think they're from the same company. Considering how bland the redesigned-for-2012 Civic was, that's a great thing. And Honda's new CEO, Takahiro Hachigo, thinks he can continue making changes to keep that momentum going.
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That's the news from Reuters reporter Norihiko Shirouzu, who spoke with two senior Honda insiders about how Hachigo, nearly a year into his CEO role, plans to shake up the way the automaker does business. According to the sources, who wished to remain anonymous, Hachigo is planning to add more separation between the teams developing new cars and the people in charge of selling them, which he believes will lead to the company building better cars.
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"Over the years, our product development process became overly complex and slow, involving a huge number of engineers and sales and marketing people," one exec told Reuters. As a result, "we began producing watered down, uninspiring, what you might call designed-by-committee, cars."
The CEO has reportedly created a task force of younger executives to help him turn change that process and rebalance the power between the engineering and marketing teams.
"Sales people involved in product planning are more focused on customers' immediate needs. We need to stay focused on that, but it's not much help in figuring out what kind of car we should be putting out 5-10 years down the road," another exec said to Reuters.
While limiting the role of the sales executives in planning future products, Hachigo also wants to make the research and development team more independent. He also wants to centralize product planning in Japan to make Honda's offerings more consistent across its various regions.
Obviously, there's more to building great cars than kicking the marketing team out of product planning meetings, but it's at least a step in the right direction. We like the idea of a company with the goal of building quality cars that people want to buy instead of relying on bland-but-reliable offerings to bring in profits.
Considering how much more enjoyable cars like the 2016 Accord and Civic are to drive than in previous generations, if Hachigo can find a way to continue that success, we're pretty sure that can only be a good thing.
via Jalopnik
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de Road and Track