When a racing team from Japan arrived at the Isle of Man in 1959, to take part in the 125cc TT race, very few people knew who the company was, let alone realise that they were witnessing the first stirrings of what would become the most successful motorcycle racing team and the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world.
Fast forward 66 years, and Honda Motor Co. has reached the unbelievable milestone of cumulative global motorcycle production of 500 million units!
The Honda company was formed in the late 1940s, although the story begins earlier than that. Soichiro Honda founded his first company in 1936, manufacturing piston rings. In 1946, the Honda Technical Research Institute was formed, initially producing motorised bicycles using war surplus 50cc engines. When these ran out, Honda designed and built its own engines, and it was a short step from that point to the arrival of the first fully Honda-built motorcycle, the Dream D-Type, in 1949, 76 years ago.
The rise of the Japanese motorcycle industry can be traced from that moment, with Honda playing a leading role. The arrival of the Super Cub in 1958 signalled the creation of the most successful motorcycle design in history, with well over 100 million sold, and still selling! By 1961, a mere two years after their appearance at the TT, Honda was winning races and championships and hasn’t stopped since.
By 1968, Honda had built 10 million motorcycles, with 50 million coming up in 1984. The 100 million motorcycle milestone was reached in 1997, 48 years after the Dream D-Type was launched, which is respectable, but nothing compared to the growth since then.
It then took 11 years to reach 200 million motorcycles produced and only six years to reach 300 million. By 2018, annual global production reached 20 million units, while a cumulative total of 400 million was reached in 2019. Now, in 2025, the magic 500 million total has been achieved.
From those humble beginnings in Japan, Honda now has 37 factories in 23 countries, selling motorcycles through 30,000 Honda dealers.
That is quite the success story and, at this rate, we’ll be reporting on the 600 million mark in around 2030 and, possibly, 1 billion motorcycles by 2050 or so!
Not bad for a company that started in a small garage in Hamamatsu by one of the engineering greats of all time, Soichiro Honda.
