My wonderful wife and I have Sirius/XM radio in all of our vehicles. When we are driving together we usually listen to Channel 6, the Sixties channel. We enjoy it, but the catalog is kind of limited. If we listen 2-3 days consecutively we are certain to hear songs repeated even if we are driving at different times of the day.
One song that we have heard a lot is “Little Honda” by the Hondells. The song lyrics are about driving a Honda motorcycle; the song was written by Mike Love and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. I am not a motorcycle person even though my father rode. He actually owned a Honda bike for a short time until he became a Harley-Davidson enthusiast. He rode those for more than a decade until he almost died in an accident. Inconvenient truth: per mile driven a person is 25 times more likely to die on a motorcycle than in a car.
When I think of a “Little Honda” I think of something like this:
From Bring a Trailer a picture of a 1964 Honda S600 roadster. I have a thing for small, two-seat roadsters even though they’re probably not that much safer than a motorcycle.
The S600 was really Honda’s first “mass-market” car even though only about 13,000 were made, including about 1,800 coupes, from 1964 to 1966. They were not overly quick, they probably couldn’t reach 100 MPH, but were fun to drive for the people in their market. A little more power probably wouldn’t hurt (their inline four-cylinder engine produced 57 HP), although I don’t think I’d agree with Bill Stephens of NBCSN and the Mecum auctions who would, probably only half-kiddingly, talk about putting a Mopar 392 Hemi in one of these.
In 1970 (couldn’t find data for 1965), Honda produced about 277,000 cars of which only about 4,000 were sold in the US. Ten years later, Honda made about 846,000 cars of which approximately 375,000 were sold in the US.
“First gear, it’s all right (Honda, Honda, go faster, faster)
Second gear, I’ll lean right (Honda, Honda, go faster, faster)
Third gear, hang on tight (Honda, Honda, go faster, faster)
Faster, it’s all right.”
#HondaS600
#BillStephens
#somanycarsjustonelife
#disaffectedmusings
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Disaffected Musings 
It seems to me that if you stuffed a V-8 in one of these little cars it would only be good in a straight line. I think it would suffer from massive understeer. (The opposite of early Porsches with lots of understeer.)
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Yes, sir. I believe you are correct, but I think Bill Stephens used to be a drag racer.
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I never saw one of these early Hondas. Clearly reminiscent of a British Roadster. >grin<
My wife and I are also Sirius XM listeners. She always listens to 60s on 6 and even though I'm a few months older than she, I hang out on 70s on 7 most of the time. Lately, though, I've found I like Yacht Rock Radio. That channel really has a short play list, but 70's on 7 is better. All could use a greater number of selections.
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My musical tastes are decidedly non-mainstream. One thing that really irked me was when the Modern Jazz channel was eliminated after the Sirius/XM merger.
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I can understand that. I’m pretty “main stream” Top 40 or 80’s-90’s era country music so I have plenty of choices on Sirius XM.
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