Yahoo Autos The California Dealer That Risked It All to Sell America's First Hondas
Lori and Bill Manly saw their first Honda car at the factory in Suzuka, Japan, in 1967. They’d won a trip to Japan from American Honda, a commendation for the sales volume at their eight-year-old motorcycle dealership, Honda of Santa Rosa, an hour north of San Francisco. “We sold a lot of motorcycles,” says Lori Manly, now 88.
The car, the Honda N360, was unlike anything on American roads. It weighed just over 1000 pounds. It had a transversely mounted, air-cooled, two-cylinder alloy engine under its tiny hood, driving the front wheels through a four-speed manual transmission. It had wheelbarrow-sized 10-inch wheels. It took nearly 20 seconds to accelerate to 60 mph. With just 118 inches of vehicle between its chromed bumpers, it was three-and-a-half feet shorter than a VW Beetle. In fact, it was a foot shorter than the wheelbase of a contemporary Cadillac Coupe DeVille.
This story originally appeared in Volume 4 of Road & Track.
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Bill and Lori were smitten. “My dad was a fabulous mechanic and a car lover,” says Brian Manly, who now runs the family dealership. “I think he gravitated toward the quality of the Honda brand. He could recognize quality. He said to my mom, ‘If it’s anything like their motorcycles, I bet it’s a pretty damn good car.’”
The Manlys immediately began a campaign to sell Honda’s little car to their customers. The following year, they got word that American Honda was considering bringing the new N600, a slightly more powerful version of the N360, stateside. “As Honda decided to offer a car in the United States, they went to their friends and family first, and those were the California motorcycle dealers,” says Steven Center, Honda’s current vice president of automobile sales. “They were picked because of their culture and their attention to consumers, service, and quality.”
The Manlys were among those chosen, but Bill had a special request. “My dad asked to be dealer number one,” says Rita Manly Case. She grew up in the family business, and now runs one of America’s largest privately owned car dealership groups. “He said, ‘Somebody has to get dealer number one, and I want it to be me.’”
Honda required its 32 new franchisees to house their car dealerships separate from their bikes, so the Manlys purchased a former boat dealer nearby and moved the motorcycles there. “And on the side of the alleyway was a little bitty showroom for the car,” says Rita, who was just 16 at the time. “This was where I sat. So I was literally the first salesperson for the Honda car.”
Because of bureaucratic hurdles, it took two years for the first cars to roll in. (“We didn’t have any cars, so we put in a pool table,” Lori told a local reporter.)
“The Japanese Ministry of Industry and Trade ruled with an iron fist, and they told the Japanese manufacturers to pair up with an American company and sell through them,” says Center. GM had a history with Isuzu dating back to the Twenties, Ford had recently begun its partnership with Mazda, and Chrysler was deep in talks with Mitsubishi. The Ministry told founder Soichiro Honda that the Big Three was full up. “But he was a spirited guy and didn’t take no for an answer. He found a way to do it,” Center says.
Finally, in 1970, the first N600s arrived at the local port. The Manlys had received an allotment of exactly one vehicle. They sold it before any other California dealer notched a sale. “So we were the number-one car sale in the continental U.S.A. for Honda,” Lori says.
Bill and Lori Manly didn’t set out to become pioneering Honda dealers. Married in 1950 when Bill was 22 and Lori was 17, they were thrill seekers. Bill had grown up steeped in SoCal hot-rod culture. “We had Model As—two-doors, four-doors. We went to all the hot-rod meets,” Lori says. “Cars were a big part of our life.” They raced on the Bonneville Salt Flats. They flew vintage planes.
They also sought opportunity. When European cars began appearing at races, the Manlys saw a potential business. They opened Foreign Automotive in the mid-Fifties, servicing and repairing machines from Germany, Italy, and Britain.
In 1957, Cotati Raceway opened on an old naval airfield. The San Francisco Region of the SCCA held events there, and as aficionados and proprietors of a local shop, the Manlys attended, working on client cars and getting their name out to potential customers.
One day in 1959, they were at the track as support crew for a Triumph driver. “A pickup truck rolled into the pit area, and the driver said they were looking for us,” Lori says. The driver was from newly formed American Honda, which had just opened in a storefront on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. He offered the Manlys a gamble.
