In the development of motorcycles, Honda has been implementing the latest technologies. At the same time, the exterior designs have been kept evolving constantly to create new values. Meanwhile, to respond to the changing demands from the markets, a different vehicle front-design was sometimes adopted even though it was not fitting to the symbolic representation inherited through the specific model for generations. Such designing practices eventually diluted the succeeded identity resulting in failing to live up to customer expectations. To solve this, the issue of design identity was repeatedly discussed. The discussion was concluded that it is important to define a key feature of a vehicle front design that symbolizes a series of models having the same product name. Moreover, that design definition should be inherited while incorporating advanced technologies in time. To realize that, we delineated the direction by three key words: “convergence, inheritance and enhancement” as the guidelines for the design of a vehicle front. These guidelines were practically implemented and contributed to establishing a valuable principle of exterior design for our motorcycles.
Article of Honda R&D Technical Review Vol.27 No.1 (8 - 12)