Used-up Hondas are the best Hondas. “All the good names like Cougar and Wildcat were taken,” Toshio Sasaki, then Honda’s foreign sales manager, told the New York Times in February 1977. “We had to settle for Civic and Accord.” It has worked out okay.
The Civic had its 50th birthday back in 2023. In 2026, it’s the Accord’s turn. The trick here is figuring out how to celebrate a car that’s hugely significant and utterly ordinary. Consider it as the small Japanese sedan that reset the entire market’s expectations on what a great family car should be. And my family has had six of them. And two of those have been passed down through generations.
We’re down one Accord now. My mom bought it new-ish, and now my daughter Nina is driving it. Surely there will be more in the future.
View Price on AmazonAmerican Honda keeps a stash of historic cars at its American Honda Collection Hall on the first floor of the company’s headquarters in Torrance, California. Many are race cars— everything from SCCA Showroom Stock to IndyCars—and many more are production machines. So far, they haven’t let me drive one of the IndyCars. But they do keep the production machines in pristine and drivable condition. And they do let us journalist-types out with those.
I drove a bunch of these Accords, but something was missing. These were survivors; pristine examples of Accord generation. And the best thing about the Accord is that so few have survived. These were cars built to be used up and discarded. Not sit in museums or in someone’s collection. They’re supposed to survive in family memories, faded photos, and old Facebook posts. Not preserved in amber.
When the Accord went on sale in June 1976, it was an instant sales sensation. At that time, Honda had around 600 dealerships across the United States. Despite offering the Accord solely as a three-door hatchback, Honda quickly faced a backlog of orders lasting six months or more. And dealers were getting $800 or more above sticker for the car. That doesn’t seem like a huge premium now, but in 1976 and 1977 the Accord was about a $4000 car—after adding in a radio and radial tires.
“This new Honda may be the best automotive buy available in the U.S.” wrote Road & Track in the August 1976 issue. It wasn’t the sportiest front-driver around, only had 68 horsepower from its 1.6-liter, single-overhead-cam, single-carbureted four, and took an agonizing 15.4 seconds to stumble from 0 to 60 mph. Top speed was 90 mph. But it already had an unfathomably sweet five-speed manual transmission and was built with utter precision. What it was, more than anything else, was practical and refined.
Remember, this was 1976 when garbage like the Ford Pinto, Chevrolet Vega, and AMC Gremlin were still in production, and the best-selling new car in America was the gargantuan “mid-size” Oldsmobile Cutlass. Toyota was years away from introducing its first front-drive car, the earliest VW Rabbit models were bedeviled by sloppy quality, and the pretty Datsun models of the late 1960s and early 1970s had been superseded by weird and awkward acid-trip designs.
Approaching the 1977 Accord, its most striking feature is that it’s tiny. At 162.8 inches long over a 93.7-inch wheelbase, it’s 22 inches shorter than a 2026 Civic, and there’s 14 inches less space between the front and rear axles. Then I got in it.
The original Accord is tight in the hips and shoulders, but the seats are comfortable, the shifter is right where a shifter should be, and the steering wheel is thin of rim and perfect in diameter. Everything about its layout is relentlessly logical, intuitive, and slick to operate. Driving through the mean streets of Torrance, there was an ingratiating throwback vibe. Somewhere between still-chic Adidas Sambas and now-dorky Members Only jackets.
Skipping past the CB200T motorcycle my little brother Linus rode, the second-generation Accord is when my personal history with Honda cars begins. My cousin Guy Magrone, with whom I shared a bedroom for a while (separate beds),
Source: roadandtrack.com
