Most of us associate Honda with the color red. The multinational is even known as Big Red in some parts of the world. Have you ever wondered how that came to be? The answer is both obvious and convoluted.
"Interesting" is probably not quite the word to use, but I do find it at least a little curious that most motorcycle manufacturers have a signature color scheme. Kawasaki is green; Suzuki is blue; Yamaha is yellow... except when it's blue; Triumph is also blue; Harley-Davidson is black and orange. And so on and so on. For Honda, of course, the color is red. It is so closely associated with that color that the brand is colloquially known as Big Red.
You've probably never wondered why Honda chose red as its color, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Because the algorithm recently fed me a bit of Honda marketing material explaining the reason and I found it... well, again, "interesting" isn't quite the right word to use, but you get my point.
So, the reason Honda's corporate color is red is... the company's founder, Sochiro Honda, really liked it. But here's the thing: he had to fight the Japanese government to use it.
The story goes back to the 1950s, when Honda was still only producing motorcycles. Japan was in the throes of its rapid post-war transformation and the government was eager to see its automotive industry compete on an international stage. To serve as encouragement, the Ministry for International Trade and Industry held a competition aimed at encouraging automakers to produce a vehicle that could compete against the likes of those coming from the United States.
Sochiro felt he and his engineers were up to the task and decided to expand Honda into the automotive industry. Meanwhile, for reasons that I can't quite guess, the aforementioned Ministry for International Trade and Industry proposed a law that would have banned any new manufacturers from entering the market.
Ultimately, the law was never enacted but fear of missing out drove Honda to speed up the design and development of several vehicles. It wanted to be able to claim itself as a fully fledged auto manufacturer before any such law was put in place.
Which is all sort of an unnecessary way of explaining how Honda came up with the SPORTS 360 – a prototype that would ultimately evolve into the larger S500: a cute and cuddly roadster powered by a 531cc inline four-cylinder engine that produced just 44 horsepower.
Here, finally, is where the color red comes in. The guy who designed the SPORTS 360 had painted it red in drawings. For no other reason than he thought it looked cool. And Sochiro was all: "Yeah, that looks cool. Let's produce this car." But, to do so was against the law at the time. Or, at least, it was against the law to paint it red. This was because of a fear that vehicles painted red might be confused with emergency vehicles, such as fire engines and ambulances.
I find it hard to believe anyone would confuse a tiny, two-seater roadster with a fire engine. Sochiro did, too. He was so enamored with the idea of painting his car red that he made his case in national newspapers. “Red is a basic color of design," he wrote. "How can it be banned by law? I have heard of no other top nations in the world in which the state monopolizes the use of colors.”
He also decided to lean on officials at the Ministry of Transport. Ultimately he got his way; when S500 models started rolling off the production line in 1963 many were painted red.
However, it was not until almost four decades later, in 2001, that Honda officially adopted the color red as its corporate color. Technically, the shade it uses is "Honda Red."
"The deep rich red color was adopted to convey the Honda brand’s quality feel and engineering capabilities," explains a press release. Which sounds more noble than: "Our founder had this kinda weird thing for red."
Either way, it's an interesting story. Or, whatever word you want to use...
Source: Honda
