Our bonus weekend coverage in celebraton of American Honda’s 50th anniversary continues.

If you followed last week’s Event Horizon to Middletown, New York, then you saw this awesome collection of Hondas and Acuras at the This Old Honda Honda & Acura show at Formula H Motorworks.

On the photo to the right there’s a 1964 Honda T500 pickup with a bed full of Honda Kick N Go scooters, an S800 Coupe, an S600 roadster, and a JDM Beat kei car. And in case you missed it, here is a gallery of minty fresh S800, CR-X and Accord goodness. Honestly speaking, this was a better showcase of vintage Hondas than the official American Honda event!

Thanks to Brian Baker of Formula H Motorworks, who hosted the show and sent us these great photos (a couple more after the jump). (more…)

On June 11, 1959, a tiny motorcycle company set up shop on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. It had only sprung to life in Japan eleven years earlier, but its founder, Soichiro Honda, was not known for taking the easy road. (more…)

Honda’s 50th anniversary in the US is fast approaching. The magic date is June 11, but in preparation for that they’ve remodeled the lobby of their Torrance, CA building to recreate the first Honda USA storefront.

This is what it looked like in 1959. It would be many decades before the Ridgeline (Honda’s first pickup that bigger than kei-size) so they used a 1960 Chevy Apache to deliver SuperCub 50s! What did you expect, a Datsun? Who would have guessed that 50 years later, the little bike builder would be making jets and the manufacturer of that pickup would be in bankruptcy?

Photos of the recreated storefront after the jump. (more…)

On November 1, 1982, the first Japanese car built in America rolled off the assembly lines in Marysville, Ohio. The manufacturer was Honda, and the car was a gray Accord sedan wearing the license plate “USA 001″.

Today, Honda has four factories in the US, two in Canada and one in Mexico, and on February 3 Honda produced its 20 millionth North American-built car. 77 percent of the Hondas sold here are built locally and Honda has even exported close to a million of these cars to overseas markets.

As for the original Accord, it now resides at The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

[Honda]

Our hopes for a return to RWD Toyotas have been dashed on account of the drastic worldwide economic downturn. The lightweight coupe, widely assumed to be a RWD Corolla successor, has been in the works since August 2007 but according to this article the project has been put on hold until at least 2012. This comes with the news today that Toyota has posted its first operating loss since 1938, its first year in business. But those are just the beginning of woes that are slamming the Japanese auto industry. (more…)