10BEST CARS
Querying any of the 4250 workers at Honda’s Marysville, Ohio, assembly plant about what makes the Accord such a great car is akin to asking a parent why their child is special. They show no shame in taking credit. You are not likely to hear much said here about the Accord’s tremendous value, its packaging, or its sublime combination of ride and handling. Those are the kinds of things we say about the Accord. At Marysville, they talk about pride and tradition and brothers and sisters and family, the words tumbling forth with a fervor usually reserved for Ohio State football.
“Honda matters to me,” says Amy Dixon, a team leader in assembly. Dixon started with Honda 27 years ago, when she was 20. “Their airplanes matter to me. Their lawn mowers matter to me.”
She is typical of the Marysville plant, where 69 percent of the workforce has at least one decade of experience and almost half the employees have been there for two. Honda says this depth of expertise regularly pays off in improved quality. This past fall, for instance, an associate came up with a new way to position engines as they were being installed. A $45 tool was built, forestalling any further line stoppages due to engine-mount misalignment.
Keep the line running and Marysville can build 440,000 cars each year. That’s capacity enough to swallow all the other models on our 10Best list combined. Indeed, the Accord is the sole high-volume product to earn this award year after year. Both of Honda’s Japanese rivals, Nissan and Toyota, also manufacture in the U.S., in bigger plants that are just as highly regarded as Marysville. Yet, we find neither of their mid-size sedans as engaging as the Accord. The last time either one cracked 10Best, the internet wasn’t much of a thing, and Honda’s family car had already racked up nine trophies in a row. Its most recent streak, including this year, stands at 19.
“Someone who cares obviously headed development.” –D. Sherman
Marysville opened in 1979 with 64 associates dressed in identical white uniforms building motorcycles. Accord production launched on November 1, 1982, and today the pioneering facility is Honda’s global “mother” plant for the model. Honda wasn’t the first foreign automaker to assemble cars in the U.S., but Marysville was the first modern greenfield assembly plant built by a foreign automaker here.
Common knowledge said that shiftless American workers couldn’t build cars to Japanese quality standards. Yet today, plants owned by nine other foreign brands dot the American countryside like Chick-fil-A franchises. Honda has opened three more assembly plants in the United States, with a fourth on the way. And six of Marysville’s “original 64” are still employed by Honda in Ohio.
Just as Marysville builds many Accords, there are many Accords to build. They’ve all been updated for 2016 with minor styling updates and chassis tweaks. And they are all good, though some are better. A manual transmission worthy of a sports car can be found in our favorite, the four-cylinder, four-door Accord Sport. Or you can get a six-speed with a third pedal mated to the 278-hp V-6 in the coupe. That same V-6 with a proper six-speed automatic turns a loaded Accord sedan into such a luxury-car stand-in that it gives product planners in the Acura wing at headquarters as many fits as it does Honda’s rivals.
But at Marysville, they care more about people and process than product. Associates are still talking about when company founder Soichiro Honda visited Marysville in 1989, shaking hands with everyone along the line. They tell the story to the new hires, just as they explain all the rest of the plant’s history with pride. Japan doesn’t build the Accord anymore. We do. It’s ours.
How We’d Build It
The 189-hp Accord Sport is one of the great deals extant, starting—and in our case, ending—at just $24,985. Staying with the manual transmission means forgoing the Honda Sensing safety equipment. And we’d have our sedan sprayed (at no extra cost) in the newly available and attention-getting San Marino Red.
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