The Super Cub

First off, I will admit that the words “Super Cub” immediately bring to my mind a 1949 Piper two-seat tail-dragger.  This is the beautiful airplane that Max Stanley said was “so safe that it could just barely kill you.”

I suspect that for most of the world, “Super Cub” conjures up an image of the most widely produced motor vehicle in the world.  It’s still in production and at last count had sold well over a 100 million units.  That’s more than all the Volkswagen Beetles, Ford Model T’s, all the various models of Toyota Corollas, and all the military Jeeps ever produced.  Actually, the number of Super Cubs produced exceeds all of those types of cars combined.

We are talking, of course, about a 50 cc moped.  Technically….well, it’s bigger than a bicycle and it has a motor, but it is definitely not a motorcycle.  It’s a small step-through motorbike that is part mechanical perfection and part fun.  Or, as the Beach Boys put it:

It's not a big motorcycle,

Just a groovy little motorbike.

It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys,

That two-wheeled bike.

We'll ride on out of the town

To anyplace I know you like.

To really understand why this motorbike has been so important, you have to understand the motorcycle market when the Cub was first introduced.  In America, the only two motorcycle companies that survived the Great Depression were Harley Davidson and the Indian Motorcycle Company, with the latter shutting down at the end of the Korean War.  Since Harley was facing no real competition, consumers didn’t have much to choose from, with most bikes being very large, heavy machines with a reputation for being mechanically unreliable.  Even in Europe, clip-on bicycle motors were more popular than small motorcycles.

Two men changed all that.  Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa opened business in a small wooden shack where they manufactured bicycle motors in 1948.  During the postwar economic boom, the company expanded into making motorcycles.  Fujisawa handled the business details and Honda designed and built the bikes.  Fujisawa told his partner that if he could come up with a reliable motorbike, one with a cover that protected all the wires and assorted mechanical parts, it would sell well.  The only other requirement was that the rider had to be able to drive the new machine with one hand so the other hand would be free to hold a tray of soba noodles.  At that time, the streets of Japan were crowded with bicycles delivering soba noodles to the hungry salarymen (white collar workers) in their offices.

It took two years of design work, but Soichiro Honda produced a prototype of the Super Cub.  With a small, low-compression 50cc engine that starts easily (so easily that even today many purchasers opt for the model without an electric start), the bicycle could go over 200 miles on a single gallon the poorest grade, low-octane gasoline that one would expect to find in remote areas of developing countries.  The motorbike engine was air-cooled and had a three-speed automatic transmission with a top speed of 50 mph, meaning that you could learn to ride the bike in just minutes.  As the Beach Boys have said, the first gear was “all right” with a speed just barely faster than walking, but it would do so going uphill with two people on it.

As for reliability, it would be difficult to find anything more reliable that had more than three moving parts.  There are testimonials from owners who claim the bike still worked after everything on the bike had broken.  A few years ago, the Discovery Channel decided to test those claims by torturing a Cub to death.  After replacing the motor oil with vegetable cooking oil, loading it down with four times the normal load, and even setting the bike on fire at one point—the motorbike still operated normally.  (Though people said it smelled like French fries.). Finally, the show’s producers threw it off the roof of a building.  The bike fell 66 feet, bounced, bent, and still started and moved when put in gear. 

Soichiro Honda had delivered the bike his partner had wanted, so now it was up to Takeo Fujisawa to sell it.  Fujisawa didn’t start small:  he anticipated that the Cub would increase sales for the company at least ten-fold, so he built a large new factory—one that copied the latest assembly line techniques of the Volkswagen factory in Germany.  Altogether, the factory was designed to produce a staggering 50,000 motorbikes a month if the factory ran a double shift.  Fujisawa estimated that building so many units at a time, the economy of scale would effectively lower the cost of production of each bike by 18%.  

The next problem was to actually sell the bikes, first in America, then in the rest of the world.  The biggest problem selling the bikes in the United States was that the word motorcycle was nearly always followed by the word ‘gang.’  People who rode those loud obnoxious motorcycles were anti-social thugs who were either just out of jail or on their way there.  Before the movie Easy Rider came out, motorcyclists were the people you told jokes about.  (What’s the difference between a Harley and a Hoover?  The location of the dirtbag.)

Honda used a new marketing slogan:  “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

If you click on that photo to the right, you might be able to read the advertising print where you will find that this marvel of engineering sold for $245.  Add another $5.00, and you could buy  enough gas to drive from New York to Los Angeles.  (If you drove 10 hours a day at the motorbike’s top speed, you could get there in a week.)

It is hard to say what this bike did for the world.  Fifty years ago, I saw them on dirt roads in the Yucatan.  They mobilized whole nations in Africa and Asia.  This was reliable transportation for almost anyone.  Teenagers drove them home and their parents wanted to ride on them.  (And they still do.)  And they absolutely became the standard mode of transportation for delivering pizzas and soba noodles.

I can come up with only a small list of man’s creations that were so perfect at the time they were created that they seem to defy time, living on for generations.  The DC-3, the works of Mark Twain, the Browning M2, the paintings of Vermeer, and recipe for mole poblano all make the list.  I am not a great fan of motorbikes—and I have the scars to prove it—but I may be forced to add the Honda Super Cub to that short list.

Because—to paraphrase Max Stanley—it’s a reliable motorbike so safe it can just barely kill you.