New Dawn at Honda R&D

May 1, 2016

Jack Yamaguchi

Honda’s new 10-speed automatic has not yet entered production, but it is already among the technologies that competitors are clamoring to benchmark when it enters the market. Designed and built in house, the new planetary transmission for front-drive vehicles, equipped with a torque converter, is as compact as Honda’s incumbent 6-speed transaxle and is claimed to shift 30% faster and deliver a 14% improvement in acceleration.

It’s an impressive piece of engineering, but the new 10-speed’s greatest attribute may be that it exists at all.

“It wondrously escaped the corporate maze,” noted Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, who last month officially became President of Honda R&D, the automaker’s integrated research and product development organization. A 35-year Honda engineering veteran, he candidly agrees with critics and even some Honda fans who say the company that once dazzled the world with 22,000-rpm Grand Prix-winning engines, beat everyone to U.S. Clean Air Act compliance, and set the pace in innovative, efficient mobility for generations, had lost its edge in recent years.

“Business plans and strategy had prevailed, discouraging those who challenged,” Matsumoto told Automotive Engineering in an exclusive interview (his first with media) at Honda’s Tokyo headquarters. He explained that often during this lackluster period, technologies that were novel and untried were often disregarded as “prohibitive in cost for implementation.”

The straight-talking Matsumoto aims to reverse that approach. He and his R&D team are charged with invigorating their company’s product groups, with the kind of boldness that put the “motor” — a term that now includes electric and chemical, as well as internal combustion — into Honda Motor Co.

Focus on trucks, Acura

Backed by a new organizational structure that is restoring the engineering-sales balance, Matsumoto aims to strengthen Honda’s product side on all fronts — from hydrogen fuel cells and hybrid powertrains to next-generation ICEs that are targeting industry-leading 50% brake-thermal-efficiency rates, to lightweighting solutions such as those learned from the new NSX supercar, that can be transferred into more mass-efficient mainstream-vehicles.

There’s a new, separate business entity in Automotive Operations that Matsumoto said will “broadly embrace” connectivity, artificial intelligence, automated driving, as well as drive further development and commercialization of energy generation solutions. Among the most promising is the Solar Hydrogen Station, which enables users to refill their fuel-cell vehicle (FCV) overnight without the requirement of hydrogen storage.

The Solar Hydrogen Station reduces CO₂ emissions by using less expensive off-peak electrical power — and exporting renewable electricity from the vehicle’s fuel cell stack to the grid during daytime peak-power times.

Matsumoto also indicates that Honda is prepared to penetrate well beyond the latest Pilot, Acura MDX, and Ridgeline to win a greater share of the highly profitable North American truck market. He challenges those who speculate that Honda won’t venture into the true full-size truck segment.

“Never say never!” he replied. “China wants bigger SUVs. They are cash cows for our Detroit competitors, and we are acutely aware of demands.”

On the luxury-vehicle side, reinforcing and re-focusing Acura’s portfolio is a Matsumoto priority. “Especially Acura sedan,” he acknowledged, “where we had wandered left and right in product concept and execution for a couple times in the past.”

And with the HondaJet now entering service with customers, even the sky is not a boundary: “We will no longer limit ourselves to building and marketing automotive and related products, but expand to yonder,” he said.

Restoring engineers’ clout

Matsumoto shares the joy and inherent agony of conceiving, developing, and producing new automobiles with his boss, Honda Motor Co. President Takahiro Hachigo, who was Large Project Leader (LPL, or more commonly chief engineer), of the 1999 North American Odyssey and 2002 second-generation CR-V. Matsumoto during the same period led the team of designers and engineers to create the first-generation Fit, considered a triumph of packaging which established the company’s new global small car platform that subsequently produced many iterations.

While the two executives were immersed in vehicle development, Honda was pursuing a corporate strategy called ‘SED,’ short for Sales, Engineering (manufacturing), and Development. SED had worked admirably and harmoniously during the company’s earlier growth period, but then the balance among the three disciplines started tipping toward the ‘S,’ or more generally the marketing contingent located at corporate headquarters in central Tokyo.

Matsumoto observed, “There used to be super LPLs — extraordinarily imaginative, creative and resourceful engineers — presenting their ideas of distinctive and innovative products and of advanced technologies. We also had RAD, short for Representative of Automobile Development, mostly veteran R&D managers who were responsible for groups of products. The RADs at the parent Honda Motor Co. provided powerful support to those super LPLs to get their proposals through the corporate maze.”

But the proven and effective RAD system had fallen out of favor and was eventually suspended. As a result, new product and technology ideas from the engineers increasingly received more rejections than approvals when presented to the sales and marketing group. “More often, they started tending inwards,” Matsumoto recalled.

Matsumoto also brings a deep plant-floor understanding of manufacturing, having served as General Manager of the huge Suzuka “mother” factory. And like Hachigo, he spent time on the sales side, as President and CEO of Honda Motor Co. of India, a steadily growing and potential mega market. He returned to Japan in April 2015 to take charge of Honda automobile operations. A year later, he brought that function into Honda R&D Co. prior to his becoming President.

“Transfer of power? No,” he reflected. Rather, the new organization is a return “to the original, noble concept of SED from whence we in Honda R&D are taking the initiative to move the three organizations together and forward, fully understanding sales and engineering’s requirements,” Matsumoto asserted. “I am certain we are moving in the right direction.”

“Time to correct” regional R&D

Honda’s trajectory includes pursuit of its “Six Region Structural Strategy,” based on development and use of “global” and “local” models. The former are represented by such mainstream, high-volume nameplates as Fit, Civic, Accord, and CR-V that are underpinned by common global architectures. The strategy hasn’t been without its challenges. According to CEO Achigo, “Processes that had grown increasingly complex raised some issues such as an increase in man-hours and workload” during vehicle development and production, hence the recent major change in corporate organization.

Matsumoto sees the “globalization” of vehicles as essentially localization, or perhaps at most regionalization. Honda had earlier anticipated that the developing markets’ demands would grow hugely — and accordingly, the company would produce specific models for those countries. But among those markets, there are major differences in customer needs and desires. Matsumoto cited India where “more rural customers want what the rest of the world gets.

“Global models may very well meet their [developing market] demands. Certainly some isolated areas might have to have specific local models,” he continued, “but then that would be terribly inefficient. That pitfall we have come to avoid.”

Honda has established and is currently operating satellite R&D facilities in line with the Six-Region Strategy. Matsumoto is now seeing their limitations, drawing human resources from the main R&D operations in Japan for their regional and local products.

“Time to correct,” he said emphatically, “except the fully proficient American R&D operations, that produced the new Acura NSX and the new Honda Civic — the fruits that epitomize their tremendous endeavors and achievements of those several years.”

When asked about the protracted (nearly 9 years) development cycle of the all-new NSX, which included some major systems re-engineering including a new engine design, Matsumoto responded bluntly. “NSXs do not happen often,” he said. “Our concern and efforts are in cultivating and improving the brand in the country where a larger demand exists.” North America also has spawned the latest Civic, developed by the Ohio-based R&D team of which Matsumoto is proud.

Fuel cells moving to “next stage”

What awaits Honda R&D’s growing North American operation now that the 2016 Civic and 2017 NSX are launched? “Light trucks are their own, with very little meddling from Japan,” grinned Matsumoto. “In the North American market, our product ratios between cars and light trucks are 50/50, so there is plenty of work for them [the development teams]. And most of Acura passenger cars as well.”

Acura’s Chief Engineer Yosuke Sekino, with whom Matsumoto worked on the original Fit, has been making high-speed pilgrimages to the U.S. and China, his mission being “to straighten our course, energizing both Honda and Acura sedan lines.” A point of pride is the Acura ‘Precision Concept’ unveiled at the 2016 Detroit show, which Matsumoto said hints at the design and technology paths future Acura sedans will take.

CEO Hachigo pledged that two-thirds of new Honda vehicles will be electrified by 2030, and Matsumoto adds that they are aiming at the general acceptance of fuel cell vehicles — what he calls “a different ballgame altogether” — in the 2025-30 timeframe. Honda and its fuel cell partner GM are now developing vehicle applications for their shared stack, which he said is based on Honda’s latest design. “Soon we and GM are moving onto the next stage of development,” he noted.

While Honda has not defined its position on battery EVs, it will be putting more emphasis on plug-in vehicles overall. Honda engineers are not optimistic about the prospects for a significant leap in EV battery capability, Matsumoto explained. Should that leap occur, the ICE would be relegated to a range-extender function. He conceded that Honda’s progress in hybrid and PHV development was hampered by “auxiliary complications bringing about irrational solutions,” without providing details. The next generation of electrified products, he said, will feature fundamental vehicle re-designs and new platform concepts, rather than just a new powertrain in an existing platform.

In the near-term, the next-generation Accord Hybrid is adopting the 2-motor i-MMD system from the latest Japan-market Odyssey. Noteworthy is its Atkinson-cycle 2.0-L i-VTEC port-injected ICE, combined with an electric motor rated at 135 kW (181 hp) and generous 315 N·m (232 lb·ft) at 0-to-2000 rpm. The e-motor is Honda’s own design and manufacture, and 23% lighter than the previous Accord Hybrid motor by employing unique wire winding. Honda traditionally has manufactured its own electric motors; whether or not that practice continues “is open to question, depending on technological progress as well as on serious study as a business case,” Matsumoto said. “We may be exposed to competition from industries that we have had scant dealing or insight.”

While such disruption is increasingly common in the industry, the newly energized Honda R&D will itself be playing more of a disruptor’s role, its designers, engineers, and scientists characterized by their boss with a Japanese four-character idiom that means, in baseball style: “Each pitch thrown with full soul.”

---