This just might be the least well-known car Honda ever made. Which isn’t all that surprising, seeing that only about 8000 of these were made, and only a little over a 1000 went into Export. And most of them went down here, to Australia. But what made this car even stranger was its engine.
The 1300 Coupe 9 was based on the then largest car Honda had ever made, the 1300 Sedan. This was a rather conventional looking small sedan. Originally, it was too conventional looking for Soichiro Honda, who ordered a re-design late in the game. Apparently, he wanted the font-end to look a bit more like his personal transport, a Pontiac Firebird.
But where his influence was most apparent was under the bonnet. To quote the man himself:
“Since water-cooled engines eventually use air to cool the water, we can implement air cooling from the very beginning. That will eliminate the problem of water leaks, and it will facilitate maintenance. The question here is how to reduce the loud noise characteristic of an air-cooled engine to a level commensurate with a water-cooled unit.”
And at that time, Mr Honda’s wish was his engineers’ command. In the ever so polite words of Hideo Sugiura, then the head of the R&D Center:
Having such a leader [as Mr Honda], the sentiment in the company was that we had to see it all the way through, regardless of where the road might take us. There was to be no surrender. We could not give up halfway.
So, in order to achieve that, the engineers came up with “DDAC”, or Duo Dyna Air Cooling. In this engine, the cooling “water jacket” was combined with the concept of air-cooled engine; the outer wall of the cylinder block is part of the structure in a two casting mold. It has the cooling air passage in the space where coolant would flow in a water-cooled engine. One fan forced cooling air through the passages, while another fan helped remove the heated air from the engine.
And the complications didn’t end there. The engine was a dry-sump design with a pressurized oil system feeding from a tank. The electrical system was another matter — it had a separate redundant set of wiring on each side of the car. In “Coupe 9" trim, equipped with four Keihin carburetors, the engine developed 115 PS at 7,300 rpm. That was pretty good going for a naturally aspirated 1300cc engine in 1969!
The far more common “77" sedans and “Coupe 7s” still made a respectable 100PS, also at 7300rpm with a single carburetor. All of these complications meant that the car was far more expensive than its main competitors - such as the Toyota Corona, Mazda Capella, Mitsubishi Galant, and Nissan Bluebird. By 1973, even Soichiro Honda had to admit that his design, while ingenious, wasn’t what the market wanted. The car was quickly replaced by the “145" - a short lived stop gap model with a conventional water-cooled engine. By then, the Civic was ready for production and the Accord soon followed. The rest his history.
There is a lot more to say about the innovations used to make this little car - but the good people at Jalopnik have already done this for me, so just take a peek here:
As to the model, this is of course yet another Tomica. It is Made in Japan, but not a “Black Box”. This one was made some time in the 1980s for Honda Direct Marketing to be sold through their car dealerships. Tomica actually added some hand-painted “chrome” accents and tail lights to this edition which the original Black Box models didn’t have. So it does look a bit better in that department. It is one of the harder castings to find, and I got pretty lucky about 10 years ago to get this one off a German ebay seller for a “relatively” nice price.
