The Honda Accord began as a bigger Civic, not a Mustang rival
Honda's first sketch for a larger car was a six-cylinder saloon, and rumours even cast it as a rival to the Ford Mustang. Costs killed that plan. Instead engineers stretched the frugal Civic into a roomier hatchback called the Accord. It went on to become the first Japanese car built in America and to sell over 19 million units.
Honda had been a motorcycle giant before building cars in 1963, and its breakthrough came with the space-efficient Civic in 1972. Its CVCC engine, added in late 1973, met the decade's emissions rules without needing a catalytic converter or unleaded petrol. The upmarket follow-up started life as Project 653, a four-door with a two-litre inline six. To save money and reuse the Civic's parts and factories, the brief was rewritten as Project 671, essentially a scaled-up Civic.
Launched in May 1976 as a three-door hatchback weighing roughly 900 kilograms, the Accord looked a lot like Volkswagen's Scirocco, prompting talk of copying, though Honda had frozen its design months before the German car appeared. The name was chosen to express harmony between people, society and the automobile; Opel sued, arguing it sounded too much like its Rekord, and lost. Buyers liked its modest size and fuel economy, and it came with extras then unusual on Japanese saloons, such as cloth seats, a rev counter and intermittent wipers. It was also among the first cars under two litres to offer power steering.
America became its heartland. Production began in Marysville, Ohio, in 1982, and for sixteen years it was the country's best-selling Japanese car. In 1989 it became the first model from an import brand to top the overall American sales chart. Car and Driver has named it to its annual 10Best list a record 38 times.
The car kept growing. By the late 1990s it had become a mid-size model sold on a shared platform with bodies tailored to each market, and the North American version launched in 2007 was big enough to be classed as full-size. Honda announced in 2023 that Accord production would shift to Indiana, freeing the Ohio plant for electric vehicles.
Source: Honda Accord
