Honda's founders retired in 1973, leaving a hand-picked engineer in charge

Takeo Fujisawa worried as early as 1956 about a structure that would let Honda Motor outgrow its founders. He made directors' meetings a training ground where young managers presented and debated, and he pushed the independent Honda R&D unit so the company would rely on collective expertise rather than the genius of Soichiro Honda alone.

The transfer began in April 1970, when four senior managing directors — Kiyoshi Kawashima, Kihachiro Kawashima, Michihiro Nishida and Takao Shirai — took operational leadership. The 1971 dollar shock exposed how much the founders lagged the times, and the board launched the New Honda Plan (NHP) in April 1972 under Kawashima to make the company able to respond to change.

In October 1973, on the company's 25th anniversary, Honda and Fujisawa officially retired and Kawashima assumed the presidency. Honda's famous reply when asked to step aside — "If you want, I could even quit today" — capped a transition Fujisawa had designed for more than a decade.

The New Honda Plan rebuilt decision-making around young managers, and the company launched the Civic era without depending on its two founders.

Fujisawa treated successor development as the founders' most important job.

Young directors were deliberately stripped of line duties to learn what a director really does.

The dollar shock proved the founders could no longer keep up with the times.

Kawashima's New Honda Plan institutionalized fast response before the handover.

A founder's real job is deciding who comes next; a decade of grooming beats a sudden handover under pressure.

Honda entered the US car market in earnest under the post-founder leadership, with the Civic (introduced in 1973) as the spearhead. Kawashima himself stepped aside at 55 to hand the presidency to Tadashi Kume, showing the same discipline his mentors had practiced.