Over the span of 65 years, Volkswagen built more than 23 million air-cooled Beetles. Since 1977, the Ford F-Series has been the best-selling pickup truck in the US, with 40 million produced. As a nameplate, Toyota's moved more than 43 million Corollas over 11 generations.
With all due respect, those are rookie numbers.
Say hello to Honda's Super Cub, champion of the combustion-engine landscape. Well over 100 million Super Cubs have been sold worldwide, making it the most widely produced gasoline-powered conveyance on the planet. It's a vehicle that put South Asia on wheels and was America's first handshake with a Honda. Since 1958, this little motorcycle has seemed an immortal part of the Honda story, decked out in corporate red and white paint, looking like something Santa's elves would ride around the shop.
But as of May 2025, Honda is killing off the 50cc Super Cub for its home market. No longer a ubiquitous feature of life in Japan, it has been largely supplanted by electric bikes and scooters. It’s also on the chopping block because of the current model's inability to hit emissions targets. It is the end of an era.
Well, sort of. The last rear-engine Beetle to reach the US was delivered in 1979, and air-cooled VeeDub culture has proved to be an unkillable cockroach. Even though sales have tapered off sharply from a peak of nearly 3 million globally in 1982, there are used Super Cubs all over the place in Japan and the Far East. It’s easy to see why; They’re mechanically simple, fun to ride, cheap and useful.
Further, the larger Super Cub 125 is still kicking around, and Honda's half-dozen-strong miniMoto range has both embraced the original's free-wheeling spirit and moved it into a new age. With all apologies to Dr. Johnson, when someone is tired of the Grom, they are tired of life.
You meet the nicest people on a Honda. And also Soichiro.
“Waigaya” is not a Japanese word and yet it is core to Honda's philosophy. Coined by Takeo Fujisawa, the quiet financial genius who was such an important foil to the maniacally driven Soichiro Honda. The word itself is linguistic babble, taken to mean “boisterous meeting.” It's still common at Honda, that all-hands-on-deck attitude, everyone's ideas considered.
Considered, but not necessarily respected. During development of the Super Cub, Mr. Honda was known to frequently yell “Baka-yaro!” as discussions became heated, which means “stupid idiot.” Soichiro was not above smacking you upside the head or whacking you with a wrench from time to time.
Well over 100 million Super Cubs have been sold worldwide, making it the most widely produced gasoline-powered conveyance on the planet.
But perhaps this intensely driven force was just the thing needed to crack the recipe behind the original Super Cub, as the mission brief seemed impossible. Inspired by seeing Europeans riding around on little NSUs and Vespas, Fujisawa laid out plans for a new sort of everyman motorcycle. He wanted delivery drivers to be able to operate it one-handed, for it to be rugged enough for Japan’s mostly unpaved roads, and sized for riders of all types. And also, could the engineering team please squeeze four times the horsepower of the current two-stroke 50cc out of the world's first overhead-valve four-stroke?
At first, Honda wasn't that interested, preferring instead to dream of winning the Isle of Man TT races. Fujisawa persisted, Soichiro brought his full intensity to bear, and the team created a breakthrough on the level of the Ford Model T.
The first production Super Cub 50 featured a step-through frame, a 50cc single-cylinder engine that revved to 9,500 rpm, a three-speed semi-automatic gearbox with a centrifugal clutch, and a plastic fairing to protect the rider from wind and dirt. It also had 17-inch tires that were much better suited to varying terrain than the tiny tires of a contemporary scooter. Plus the scooter's central, low-mounted engine gave it balance.
It was a hit in Japan right out of the gate; By its second year, the SuperCub accounted for 60 percent of all domestic motorcycle sales. Fujisawa, however, dreamed bigger and cast his eyes across the Pacific. At the time, the motorcycle market in the US was pathetically tiny, just 60,000 bikes sold per year (Honda had already sold 100,000 more Super Cubs than that in Japan alone).
With its low price ($295 in 1963, about $3,000 now) and friendly demeanor, the Super Cub was an ideal toy for American consumers, rather than the pragmatic mobility solution it was in Japan. New York-based Grey Advertising, Mad Men in real life, bought a UCLA graduate's class project concept and spun it into the You Meet The Nicest People On A Honda campaign.
Featuring brightly colored pictures of all manner of ordinary—and, more importantly, respectable—people riding Honda's Super Cub, the campaign was a breakthrough. Sales went through the roof, to the point that American Honda president Kihachiro Kawashima had to occasionally pitch in and drive the delivery trucks.
The export-focused CA100 came with a tandem seat, which inspired the Beach Boys to pen Little Honda, with the lyrics, “It's not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike. It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys, that two-wheeled bike.” At first, other manufacturers thought Super Cub riders would eventually move up to bigger British or American bikes. In actuality, Honda kept offering its own bigger-displacement models, growing to become the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world.
Kapcai: The Cub in Southeast Asia
On a side street in central Vancouver, British Columbia, Dennis Cheong kickstarts his customized 1983 Honda Passport, and it lopes into a happy thumping that’s an all-too-familiar sound in Kuala Lumpur. Cheong's creation is a Street Cub, a faithful recreation of one of the modified Cubs of Malaysia, authentic and unique in its style.
He built it himself in his relatively tiny basement shop, a place which currently contains about eight small Honda frames, including a current project to resto-mod a 1968 C65 for less than the price of a new Honda Trail 125. Cheong's Malaysian heritage sent him down the rabbit hole of exploring the Kapcai scene (a catch-all term for Cub-like bikes, Honda or not), and as modifying motorcycles is purely an underground scene over there, it's a style you're unlikely to see on this side of the Pacific.
While the Super Cub arrived in America like a thunderclap, its rise in Southeast Asia was slower, following the economic growth of the countries there. The exception was Vietnam, which received 750,000 imported Honda motorcycles, almost all Super Ccubs, over the course of the Vietnam war—James May selected a SuperCub to ride during Top Gear's Vietnam special. All across Asia, there are unique export market Cubs and regional terms for them: in Indonesia, the Cub is called a bekbek, or duck; in the Philippines, the XRM110 is a motocross-infused Super Cub.
Super Cub Spirit
Today, the Honda Super Cub looks like a charming anachronism, still a touch of glossy mid-century optimism to its enclosed fairing and swoopy lines. In 125 form, it's not a big seller in the US, and north of the border in Canada, Honda doesn't even bother offering it.
But the original has given rise to a host of related products: The aforementioned Grom standard motorcycle, the Dax and Monkey minibikes, the adventurous Trail 125, and the budget-priced Navi. Let's take a quick spin on this last.
For just $1,995, the Navi is probably the Honda product that cleaves closest to the SuperCub of the early 1960s, a fun mobility toy that's approachable to any rider. It's useful! It's cheap! Being a Honda, it'll probably last until the heat-death of the universe. Perhaps most importantly, the Navi is one of the most efficient ways of converting liquid dinosaurs into grinning, laugh-in-your-helmet buffoonery.
In this last way, this is the true distilled essence of the Super Cub, anointed on this littlest Honda in the way a priest might bless a child at its baptism. Born of Soichiro's drive and Fujisawa's daring, a machine that motorized Asia and motorcycle-ized America, both cultural and historical icon, the Super Cub changed the world. It did so by appealing to a central human truth. When something moves us, we love it.
