CarGene
Ryo Mukumoto

Ryo Mukumoto

HondaDevelopment lead

Joined as a modeler, and led the life-size sports car he proposed in a product-planning competition for the R&D company's 50th anniversary through to production as the S660

Timeline

  1. 2007

    Joined

    Honda R&D Co., Ltd.

  2. 2015
    S660
    S660

    2015–2022Development lead

    What happened to you?

    When he went home in the S2000 he bought as his first car after getting a job, his friends back home were stunned and asked, "What happened to you?" People of his generation had lost interest in sports cars. Then came a product-planning competition for Honda R&D's 50th anniversary. Mukumoto proposed not a sports car that had become too expensive and too fast, but a life-size sports car that even he could master, because he believed he was not the only one who felt that way.

    Even without a charismatic leader

    Once the project started, many young developers inside R&D who shared the same idea gathered. The definition of a sports car differs from person to person: high power, lightness and good looks can all make a sports car. The team set out to work out thoroughly why sports cars are fun, and even without a charismatic sports-car figure, they thought it through together and drove it again and again to check that it was becoming what they were aiming for.

    The Beat and the Monkey

    The S2000 that Mukumoto bought some time after joining the company was more than he could handle, and he rarely felt he was truly mastering it. What he entered in a new-product proposal competition held around then, which became the prototype of the later S660, was not a serious sports car like the Type R but a "yuru-supo" (easygoing sports car) that anyone could casually enjoy driving. What he pictured was an evolved Beat and the 50cc Monkey. In high school he had ridden a Cub with the same engine to school, and he liked the feeling of riding flat out and of the rider making up for what the machine lacked.

    Moving Forward Even After the Earthquake

    The year after the project entered preliminary study, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck and the research center was also damaged. Mukumoto thought this was no time to be building sports cars and that it was over. But the people at the top of the research center told him to keep moving forward. A struggle during development was that the yuru-supo idea could not be expressed in numbers and was hard to get across. Because of Honda's culture that if you build something, you build it seriously, the S660 has many aspects of a serious sports car as well. Even so, Mukumoto believes that because it was built in earnest, people can feel a pleasure that has nothing to do with being fast or slow, such as how good it feels just to turn at an intersection.

    LPL, Automobile R&D Center

Profile

Development leader of the S660. LPL at the Automobile R&D Center of Honda R&D Co., Ltd.

Translated from Japanese sources.

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