‘He made the 750 look small’
Honda already had hopes of breaking into the American market when the CB750 was just sketches on a notepad. But, as their current CB450 was already outperforming competitors’ bigger capacity motorcycles – namely Triumph and Norton – they couldn’t understand why they needed a bigger capacity machine, especially as their bikes suited their home market perfectly.
Leader of the project, Yoshiro Harada, visited the US to research what was then going to be the latest CB450, but he quickly found that consumers wanted a bigger machine. He wasn’t the only one to come to this conclusion, but he was left with a question – how big did the new bike need to be?
The capacity was decided after company founder Soichiro Honda visited Switzerland in 1968.
“A policeman on a white police motorcycle came into the park where we were,” he was reported as saying afterwards.
“He then got off his bike. I was watching it, thinking what a small motorcycle he was riding. I was amazed to find it was a Triumph 750cc. So, actually the motorcycle was fairly big, but it looked small since the policeman was so big.
“I knew then that our motorcycles wouldn't sell in foreign markets if we kept building them according to our Japanese perceptions.
“That's why I started telling them to develop a bigger model as soon as possible."