January 7, 2003
Rugged Rubber Buggy Bumpers à la Honda
By KEN BELSON


TSUNOMIYA, Japan — They work as furiously as any Indy pit crew. In white jumpsuits and green baseball caps, the 10-man cleanup team arrives seconds after a tiny lime green Fit and a midsize four-door Legend smash into each other at about 30 miles an hour. Hubcaps are retrieved, broken glass swept up and computers plugged into the cars' data boxes.

This is Honda's crash test center, one of the world's most advanced. The lab the size of a dozen football fields is at the forefront of Honda's efforts to reinvent itself as a safety leader — the Volvo of Japan.

Having earned a reputation as a maker of cheap, reliable and fuel-efficient cars, Honda — now Japan's second-largest carmaker — wants also to be known as a builder of supersafe vehicles that can stand with the best in the world. Changing public perceptions in any industry is difficult, however, and doubly so in the car market, where drivers have deep loyalties and make complex decisions based as much on emotion as rationality. Safety, most shoppers will say, is essential, but more than price, design and comfort? Besides, how much safety is enough?

For those who put a premium on side air bags, secure child seats and antilock brakes, Honda has never been the first brand to jump to mind. Like many Japanese automakers, Honda Motor has won the hearts of cost-conscious commuters, but its cars were often viewed as light and liable to be on the losing end of an accident. Initially known for its motorcycles, Honda's first hit in the 1970's was the Civic, a car seemingly as secure as a Volkswagen Beetle. When it came to safety, Volvo and Mercedes were miles ahead.

But now safety sells, so Honda is forging ahead. The Pilot sport utility vehicle and the similar Acura MDX, among others, are now considered the safest in their class in the United States, Europe and Japan. In independent crash tests, Honda regularly equals or beats its Japanese rivals, Toyota and Nissan, which for years were considered safer bets. Unknown to most consumers, Honda's cars are also now packed with features most makers ignore, like designs aimed at improving protection for pedestrians struck by cars.

"Honda is trying to position itself as environmentally friendly, but also safe," said Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. "Everyone wants to be Volvo."

Some might question whether all the extra effort to emulate a less-than-successful Swedish brand is worth it. Honda will not disclose how much it spent to build the crash center two years ago and, like its competitors, has a hard time calculating how much it generates from its investment in safety testing. Crash dummies alone cost about $1 million each and the 150 workers who prepare the tests and analyze the results are not cheap. American-made Honda models are sometimes shipped here for testing, too.

Still, while investors may quibble about the value of such a high-cost operation, it is hard to argue with Honda's success. The company earned a record 363 billion yen ($3 billion) in the year to March 2002 as sales hit records. Honda's CR-V, Civic, Odyssey minivans and Pilot S.U.V.'s are popular even though the company has offered fewer incentives than American carmakers. Honda has also gained in Europe's notoriously difficult market.

At home, Honda's Fit — a subcompact known as the Jazz in Europe but not intended for the American market — is on track to become Japan's top seller, displacing Toyota's Corolla, the leader for three decades.

Though it is hard to quantify the link between Honda's results and safety record, consumers do value its advanced technology, which is embodied in the safety center. Technicians can ram cars together at various angles, not just drive them into barriers — much as Volvo can at its crash center in Sweden. Honda also gauges the impact of crashes on pedestrians by smashing cars into dummies. Tests are conducted year round, with 36 high-speed cameras to monitor the outcome.

"You don't see most safety or environmental features, but they are just as important to consumers," said Tomiji Sugimoto, the 47-year-old chief engineer at Honda's Tochigi R&D Center here in Utsunomiya, an hour north of Tokyo by bullet train. "And once these features are included in the car, people value them."

Honda's drive to improve safety is largely a result of its exposure to markets overseas, where the company sells two-thirds of its cars. Standards in the United States and Europe are generally tougher than in Japan, and Westerners are more likely to scrutinize independent safety reports. And though Honda's share of the American market has now surpassed 8 percent, it cannot compete just on price and performance if it wants to keep growing at a record pace. Like Toyota and Nissan, it is trying to broaden its lineup of cars and add features to appeal to a broader base of customers.

Toyota and Nissan were the first to grasp this concept. In 1996, the two companies began major campaigns in Japan to coincide with the introduction of air bags and other safety features. (Each company has its own test center, though neither is as sophisticated as Honda's.)

Uneasy about shocking Japanese consumers, they drafted popular baseball players, Hideo Nomo and Ichiro Suzuki, as pitchmen instead of filming head-on collisions and recoiling crash dummies.

The soft sell worked, particularly with women who make up a growing proportion of Japan's car owners. Japanese, it turned out, were willing to pay more for safety. In a survey by the Nikkei New Products Review last June, buyers said safety was their first priority in a new car, ahead of design, price and roominess.

The deregulation of Japan's auto insurance market in the late 1990's has given consumers extra incentives to seek out safer cars. Tokio Marine and Fire, Japan's largest casualty insurer, has expanded the discounts it offers drivers of cars with side air bags, auto brakes and antiskid systems. Other insurers have followed suit.

The race to be known as the Japanese Volvo has grown with DaimlerChrysler's purchase of a stake in Mitsubishi Motors, Japan's fourth-largest carmaker. Advertisements for the first car produced by the team, a hot-selling compact, the Colt, play up its German technology. Commercials show the Colt crashing into a barrier in slow motion as a woman sings a sultry version of "Over the Rainbow." In a deep voice, the narrator intones, "When it comes to safety, the Japanese and Germans take matters seriously."

The explicit crash scene in the commercial appears to have struck a chord with consumers. "After the first ad ran, our customer call center was flooded with inquiries," said Masafumi Seki, a manager in Mitsubishi's brand strategy department. "We're confident the safety ads are a factor in motivating customers to buy the Colt."

Not to be outdone, Honda has begun its own ads in the United States publicizing the Civic Coupe, which was one of only three cars to win five-star ratings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for front and side impact tests. The Accord, CR-V and Odyssey have also reached the top of their classes.

Honda has taken a low-key approach to publicizing its achievements, however. Without any fanfare, the company has focused on minimizing damage to pedestrians, partly to meet safety standards in Europe, where streets are narrower and more crowded than in the United States. The hoods of most Honda cars, for instance, are a few inches above the engine to act as a cushion when people fall on them. Windshield wiper pivots also collapse inward when pressure is applied.

The attention to pedestrians makes business sense. People on the street are involved in 28 percent of auto accidents in Japan, about twice the rate in the United States. Drivers can lose their licenses in Japan for striking someone, depending on the severity of the accident. In countries where third-party liability insurance is prevalent, drivers must pay for the expenses of people they hit.

To develop this technology, Honda crashes cars into dummies at various speeds and angles, and analyzes the injuries. In a recent test, technicians spent two hours hitching a gray HR-V wagon sold in Japan and Europe to a cable and dragging it along a 100-meter driveway. After alarm bells were sounded and technicians hid a safe distance away, the car ran at 25 m.p.h. toward the center of the huge room, striking the dummy at a 45-degree angle.

Within seconds, technicians in the control tower that sits above the crash site played back a freeze-frame video showing the dummy, Polar 2, as it was struck. Its legs buckled and its body rolled up the hood of the car, before smashing the windshield and falling onto the ground. Laptop computers were rushed to the scene and technicians plugged cords into the dummy to download data about injuries, a kind of digital CPR. The information was fed into Honda's G-Force Control, or GCON, engineering that is now incorporated into two million of its cars.

"They are a very R&D-intensive company," said Kurt Sanger, who covers Honda for ING Barings Securities in Tokyo. "At the end of the day, it's the brand that matters, so they try to be top of the class in everything."

Originally posted by unsure
funnie thing is, they've had an increased empahsis on safety since 99 lol, however, typical honda, their marketing sucks and not many peeps are informed that the hondas get some of the best crash scores arnd