The penultimate station on Josh de Wit’s whistle-stop tour of the UK motor industry was in Bracknell, Berkshire, the home of Honda.

The mechanical engineering undergraduate and 2016 Autocar-Courland Next Generation Award winner covered a wide variety of departments at Honda and says it was one of his best placements yet.

The first department that Josh experienced was dealer development. “I started by conducting a mystery-shopper report on a Honda dealership,” he says. “Dealerships are selected for this every so often, to check the customer experience meets Honda’s high standards.” 

Josh then went along to another dealership with Honda’s field team to see how relationships with dealers are managed. “The two dealerships were at completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of how they dealt with customers, which was very interesting to experience,” he says. “It’s all well and good engineering things, but they have to be sold effectively. Strategising the dealer network is a never-ending but important challenge.”

It wasn’t just cars that Josh worked with. He spent time with Honda’s divisions for all-terrain vehicles, such as quadbikes, and for motorcycles, and visited the marketing agency in London to see how the brand’s often ground-breaking ads are planned and produced. 

He also attended the Hampton Court Flower Show with Honda Power Equipment to talk to customers about the Miimo electric autonomous lawnmower. “People were put off by the purchase price, but once we told them about the annual running costs of £12.50, they soon warmed to the idea,” he says. 

Next up for Josh was commercial planning and market research. “It’s one thing to have the technical expertise,” he says, “but you also need the commercial expertise and to be able to manage your employees.” There was also time to visit aftersales and customer relations departments.

Josh then moved to the engineering and research and development side of things at Honda’s factory in Swindon, where the new Civic and the CR-V are built. “I found it interesting that engineering and manufacturing are conducted at the same site,” Josh says, “because they were separate at Nissan,” his previous placement.

After that, he spent a day at one of Honda’s main car export depots at the Port of Southampton, learning the processes behind transporting, documenting, storing and loading the cars, as well as where they were going and what the processes were at their destination. “It’s a huge operation and it’s great to see cars that were built in Britain and exported around the world,” he says. 

Josh also got to drive several Honda cars, including the previous and new versions of the Civic Type R, one of which he demonstrated at CarFest North, and the new Clarity hydrogen fuel-cell car.

“There are challenges with hydrogen cars,” he says. “These include the very limited infrastructure for them, efficient production and storage of hydrogen and packaging within the vehicle. So as much as I appreciate the rare chance to drive such a car and was impressed with its refinement and power, I still think the future is in battery-electric vehicles.”

The biggest thing that Josh took away from his time at Honda is how “ethically driven” the company is.

“It’s not 100% about the money,” he says. “Soichiro Honda had this philosophy that if he saw something that wasn’t right, he would cut it, regardless of the market. For example, there was once a massive market for two-stroke engines, but he didn’t like their impact on the environment, so he made four-stroke engines instead. You’ll also never find a Honda chainsaw, because he didn’t like trees being cut down.

“The way employees are treated and the public image are also very important at Honda. I think ethics are key to a successful business.”

Josh’s next and final work placement will be at Toyota.