Ot of talk about the tenere 700 but not seen much about this 450l rally

[Richard Simpson Mark II]

...it's a classic example of how Honda gets marketing wrong sometimes.

I've bored everyone before with the Melody v C50/70/90 saga.

Go on
Tell us

I was dying to ask but just couldn’t bring myself to.....bring on the can of worms!

I guess it goes like this ...
Honda had a successful formula in the C70/C90 for the working man commuting, since the 1960's

In the late 1970's the bring in the Honda 50 Melody aimed at ladies with a car licence - meaning they could ride the 50cc Melody

However Honda failed to realise that not many ladies wanted to ride a bike back then and so it flopped

Men wouldn't be seen dead on a Melody and kept buying the C50/C70 and C90 to commute to work on

Melody sales were crap as a result

Is pretty much it.

The Big H put a massive marketing effort into the Melody...including a celeb endorsement from Twiggy (ask your Grandad).

I was running a Honda dealership in Coalville, Leicestershire. We had many loyal customers for the Honda C50/70/90. Most of them were coal miners or retired coal miners: old-school working-class men of socially conservative outlook.

They used their bikes to ride to work, and take their homing pigeons out at the weekend (in ingenious home-made coop topboxes).

Imagine when one of these chaps comes into the shop wanting to trade his three-year-old blue Honda C50/70/90 in for another just like it only brand-new. He's not interested in anything other than a direct like-for-like replacement. We used to joke that you could just sell them a new numberplate!

There are, at this point, no new C50/70/90s in stock anywhere in the country.

These is, however, a warehouse full of Honda Melodys in a tasteful shade of primrose yellow. And there are 20 of the bloody things in my shop. And, the Honda rep has insisted that I hang a poster of Twiggy on a Melody up on the wall behind them. His response to my request for some/any C50/70/90s was "sell them a Melody, instead."

Can you imagine trying to sell a primrose yellow Honda Melody to a coal miner?

I sold a few to women...but only one to a man.

Meanwhile, the local Yamaha dealer was knocking out Townmates like there was no tomorrow.

[Richard Simpson Mark II]

All of which was bad enough...but it also coincided with the debacle that was the first generation of the Honda V4 motorcycles, which were probably some of the worst bikes ever made. They wore out/blew up as quickly and often as the very worst products of the British motorcycle industry, but were far more expensive and complex to repair.

To try to recover something from the situation out came the CBX550...a transverse 4 in the old Honda tradition, but with the same reliability issues as the V4s!

How the hell did they manage that?

So we had big bikes you literally couldn't give away, a range of small bikes that everyone wanted but were out of stock, and a pile of plastic mopeds that appealed to no one. There were so many of the things I had to put some out on the pavement in the hope they would be hit by an out of control Midland Fox bus ....sorry, I meant in the hope that someone might buy one.

I had a used bike stock which consisted of 25% Honda 250 Super Dreams...which no one wanted thanks to the 125 restriction on Prov licences.

I've never been happier to leave a job than the day I left that one!