Honda

The philosophy, as I read it

Honda races to learn, then builds bikes that simply and relentlessly work. Soichiro Honda's obsession was the engine itself, and the company still treats reliability as the first performance metric. Nothing on a Honda is there to impress you in the showroom; it is there to still be working in fifteen years. The E-Clutch and DCT are the modern expression of that idea, taking a skill away from the rider only where the skill was tedium.

History in a paragraph

Founded in a shed in Hamamatsu in 1948 building clip-on bicycle engines, Honda had become the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer by 1959. The Super Cub is the best-selling motor vehicle in history, the CB750 of 1969 invented the superbike, and the company has won more Grand Prix races than any other. Honda builds roughly twenty million motorcycles a year, most of them small, most of them in Asia.