The End of Detroit (13 page)

Within only a few months of its introduction in 1998, the Odyssey had leapfrogged Chrysler’s minivans to become the gold standard in family transportation. Even now, five years after its creation, as Honda prepares to introduce its next version of the Odyssey in 2004, the second-generation Odyssey remains virtually sold out across the country, selling for close to sticker price. “The Odyssey continues to be the best minivan sold in America,” said the 2003
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guide to new cars and trucks. Simply remaining in such strong demand, without incentives, is a remarkable achievement in the breathlessly competitive U.S. car market. And that would be expected if Honda had limited its production and kept it deliberately scarce, or if the Odyssey were moderately priced to begin with. But Odyssey starts above $24,000, much more than Chrysler’s cheapest minivans, and fully equipped versions can cost as much as $31,000. Regardless, in 2002 Odyssey was the second-best-selling minivan nameplate, behind the Chrysler vans and ahead of minivans from Ford, GM and Toyota, whose Sienna is considered to be the Odyssey’s only true rival for import customers. To meet the American customers’ feverish demand for it, Honda, which originally built the Odyssey on one assembly line at its plant in Alliston, Ontario, built a new factory in record time in Lincoln, Alabama, so that it could expand its supply of Odysseys. The Odyssey is not a niche product but a real volume competitor, selling nearly 200,000 a year, all at a substantial profit and to the enthusiasm of consumers across the country. “Get the Odyssey,” declared Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of “Car Talk” on National Public Radio, when a caller one weekend asked which minivan to buy.

Tim Benner had no idea that the Odyssey would turn into the juggernaut that it has become when he set out in 1994 to measure the dimensions of his Orange County, California, garage. Benner, the father of a young daughter, worked as an engineer at Honda R&D in Torrance and had been assigned by Honda on a project that the company considered to be of critical importance: the design for the second generation of its minivan. The first-generation Honda Odyssey had merely been an adaptation of the minivan that Honda sold in Japan, and the flaws were visible at a glance. “The first-generation Odyssey was a home run in Japan. It was not a home run in the States,” said Erik Berkman, an executive engineer at the R&D facility in Marysville who joined Benner on the second-generation Odyssey project. In a country where a sliding side door had become mandatory, so that children could hop in and out at will without their parents having to unbuckle themselves and let the kids out, the Odyssey arrived in the United States with four conventional doors. Moreover, the Odyssey was narrow, designed for Japan’s crowded streets and small parking places. It had a four-cylinder engine, the same used on the Accord, and lacked the power and maneuverability that a minivan needed to transport families on the highway. Interestingly, the original Odyssey had a feature that would eventually become a Honda trademark: a third row of seats that could be folded flat into the floor, creating more storage space. That was a standard feature on Japanese vans, known for their interior design and flexible use of space, which is at such a premium throughout all aspects of Japanese life. But the fold-flat seat was hardly noticed on the original vehicle, given all the other ways in which it was inferior to other minivans on the American market. Honda was selling only about 25,000 Odysseys a year when Venner was assigned to work under the project’s leader, a Japanese Honda engineer named Kunimichi Odagaki, on a vehicle they called PJ—for “personal jet.”

Odagaki, now one of Honda’s highest-ranking development executives, arrived in the United States speaking only a modest amount of English, but intrigued by the challenge of how the Odyssey could be improved. “I wanted to create an all-new minivan,” he said. “I didn’t want to eat into Chrysler. I wanted to expand the minivan market.” Modest and soft-spoken, with curly dark hair, Odagaki yields enormous power within Honda as what the company calls an LPL, for “large project leader.” Though he is virtually unknown outside Honda, within the company he demands such respect that there is talk he may ascend to one of the company’s top jobs, perhaps even as chief executive someday. The clout that Odagaki holds makes it even more remarkable that he would spend so much time on the project. In Detroit, it’s rare that a chief engineer would make it out of the office, unless for a company conference, let alone spend months on the road researching whether there was a market for a new vehicle. But it is a common practice at Honda, and a reason why its chief engineers carry so much clout. “This is good for the customer,” Odagaki explained. “I am always saying this to young engineers at Honda: ‘Please do not follow the competitors’ cars. Customers’ needs and demands are always changing. I want to hear the voice of the customer.’” Adds Berkman: “We don’t have layers of protocol and so on. Engineers have to develop their own data. Some people say, ‘I don’t want to get dirt under my fingernails.’ And we say, ‘Didn’t we explain that to you in the job interview?’”

In more formal terms, Honda’s practice is a Japanese term that translates as “go to the spot.” That is exactly what Odagaki did, traveling 25,000 miles over six months across the American South and West. Honda’s research had determined that the primary market for the kind of minivan that it wanted to create lay in cities and suburbs where new homes, new schools and new shopping malls had sprung up during the past 15 years. Though it welcomed customers from everywhere, its goal was to meet the needs of modern Middle America (or, in reality, upper-middle-class America). It felt the best place to find these people was in states like the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, along with California—all places where Odagaki and his engineering team visited. “We wanted to see the situation of usage,” said Odagaki, interviewed on a warm afternoon at Honda’s research center in Wako, Japan.

The difference between how minivans were used in Japan and their role with American consumers became clear almost immediately. In Japan, he explained, minivans were more like recreational vehicles, used primarily for long trips and for holidays. His first lesson, Odagaki said, was that “in America, minivans are not used for camping” but for everyday commutes. The three engineers—Odagaki from Japan, Berkman from Ohio, and Benner from California—learned a lot of things that any mother might have been able to tell them but seemed even more compelling because they discovered them for themselves. One realization came late at night, when the crew missed their highway exit and had to stop to look at a map. The only way to turn on a light in the old Odyssey was to illuminate the entire passenger compartment, which woke up the dozing engineers in the backseat, much to their displeasure. That taught Odagaki that there should be a separate light for the driver, so that sleeping children would not be disturbed.

Returning to California, the engineers traveled to the elementary school in Benner’s neighborhood to watch parents unload their children in the morning and load them up after school. (The research trip got them in trouble more than once. Sitting in the minivan one day, taking pictures and filming with a video recorder, Odagaki and Benner were startled to find a policeman rapping on their window, telling them in no uncertain terms to get moving. “He thought we were going to kidnap the children,” Odagaki said.) Their observations resulted in one of the biggest disputes the engineers had with senior Japanese officials over the minivan. When it introduced the original Odyssey, Honda hadn’t seen a need to include sliding doors, even though they were a feature of American minivans, and its lack of them was one of the original Odyssey’s biggest flaws. But after spending time in America, Odagaki became convinced that the Odyssey should have sliding doors on either side, and that they should be easy to operate. The Japanese engineer saw that it was difficult for both adults and children to yank open their minivan’s sliding doors and to shut them afterward. He watched in sympathy as one young father, laden with a baby, tried to open a minivan door with his free hand to let out his other children.

But the minute the engineers proposed not one, but two sliding doors, Honda’s manufacturing executives balked. “They said to us, ‘Please cancel this,’” said Odagaki. The company didn’t know how to build a vehicle with sliding doors, and including the feature would mean time and expense. Moreover, hinged doors were cheaper to engineer and to install than two large sliding doors. It turned into a serious showdown, a rarity inside a company where engineers and managers ordinarily see eye-to-eye. An engineer in Odagaki’s position generally carries so much power that even Honda’s chief executive, Hiroyuki Yoshino, can’t force changes in his designs. “I hear him, but I’m not hearing him,” Odagaki joked. Realizing that the engineers and manufacturers had reached a stalemate unsolvable by Honda’s usual consensus-building methods, Odagaki knew he would have to draw a line in the sand. “I was very afraid and scared,” Odagaki admitted, “but I’m the servant of the customer. I went to my boss’s desk and said, ‘I’ve decided we have to do this.’” In the end, he won the battle, based on their research and backed up by the videos and photos that had gotten them momentarily in trouble with the cops.

The engineers won another important battle, too, over giving the Odyssey a six-cylinder engine. Honda had honed its reputation on the reliability and the soundness of its basic four-cylinder engine, which was installed in most of its cars and had been installed on the original Odyssey as well. Sufficient for the Civic and Accord, it did not provide enough power for a bigger vehicle, which Odagaki learned when he took the minivan out on California’s freeways. He needed to be able to accelerate from lane to lane, to avoid obstacles and avert the frequent traffic jams that plague Los Angeles traffic. Once he found himself dangerously close to a guardrail, trying to get around a stalled vehicle, and the minivan’s wimpy performance convinced him that the new version of the Odyssey had to have more power under the hood. Ultimately it got it, in the form of a 3.5-liter, V-6 engine with 240 horsepower that would power the van from 0 to 60 mph in under eight seconds. It was still fuel-efficient, always a Honda priority, earning 18 mpg in city driving and 25 mpg on the highway.

Odyssey also needed a more powerful appearance. Odagaki was sitting behind the glass in a conference room, listening to the opinions of participants in a focus group that Honda had collected to discuss how buyers felt about minivans. The answer of one man caught his ear. “He said, ‘I want a minivan, but my wife doesn’t.’” Intrigued, Odagaki asked if he could visit the man’s home and speak with his spouse, in keeping with the custom of “going to the spot.” The man’s wife told him, “I have a career. I don’t want to be seen to be a housewife. A minivan is a Mommy-mobile.” What part of the minivan? Odagaki asked the woman. All of it, she replied, and after more questions, he realized that to her a Mommy-mobile was a van with a very round shape, like the curvy minivans that Chrysler was selling. “I decided the shape should be much stronger,” Odagaki said, insisting that the Odyssey have angular features and slightly squared-off corners.

That coincided with the company’s decision that Odyssey should come only with a long wheelbase, a conclusion that set it apart from Detroit vehicles and other minivans offered by Japanese companies. From the outset, Chrysler had focused on the “mini” in minivans, making long-wheelbase versions available primarily on its top-of-the-line Town & Country and on the Dodge Grand Caravan. But Honda couldn’t afford to do multiple versions of its minivan, and the concept of so many choices also didn’t fit with its focus on hitting its market target squarely in the center. Honda engineers could already tell that short-wheelbase minivans were falling out of favor. Odagaki came to that conclusion when he sat with Benner in the parking lot of a Home Depot store. Odagaki watched, fascinated, as shoppers came out toting two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood. To Benner it was an everyday event, but in Japan, Odagaki explained, almost no one spends time on major home improvement projects. Homes are too small, and besides, the country is stocked with skilled craftspeople who arrive promptly and finish the job quickly. “But Americans like to do that,” he said, understanding that it was very important to have space in the back of the minivan in order to bring the building supplies home.

He also noticed a number of short-wheelbase minivans in the parking lot that had a cargo carrier strapped to their roofs, or a cart attached to the rear end, to hold all the things that wouldn’t fit inside. It seemed incongruous that someone would spend so much money on a vehicle only to have it fall short of meeting its needs. “Maybe there weren’t cowboys in cowboy hats, but there were plenty of real people driving minivans,” said Berkman.

That meant the van had to have the fold-down rear seat that had been on the original Odyssey. But the seat would have to be wider, which would be another challenge for engineers in Japan to pull off. The original fold-down seat had only been big enough to hold two people. The engineers wanted the new Odyssey’s seat to be able to hold three, meaning it had to be four feet wide. It was another point of resistance, but one which Odagaki and his engineers were able to overcome by using their own experience. On a flight from Japan, Odagaki and the engineers rented a General Motors minivan at Los Angeles International Airport. They were unable to fit all their suitcases in the back, and there wasn’t enough seating room for the entire team, some of whom ended up sitting on one another’s laps. “It was a unanimous vote” to ask for a wide, fold-down seat, said Berkman, who calls the feature the van’s “charm point.” “People didn’t think we would do that,” he said.

In the end, Odagaki said, nothing mattered more than safety, for minivans were primarily family vehicles. He was determined that the Odyssey would be sound enough to win a five-star rating in U.S. government crash tests, because he knew that safety was a determining factor for many family buyers. Odagaki wanted passengers inside to be well protected, so each of the seven seats had headrests, and each seating place was equipped with a three-point seat belt. Every Odyssey, not just the most expensive ones, came equipped with antilock brakes and traction control, as well as a system Honda called EBD, for electronic braking distribution.