The dealer/customer mediation team at Honda corporate that I was a part of occasionally saw dealers collude with customers on made-up warranty issues. Scamming the manufacturer. We also had customers make preposterous legal claims--one took American Honda to court because the stitching on the seat of a bike in the brochure was different from the bike he subsequently bought. Then there was the Ohio car dealer who bought a cargo container of new Honda scooters and gave them away with each new car sale. Only problem, none of them ran cause they had varnished and rusted gas tanks. That one took a while to go away. We even had a case, and it was not the only one of its kind, where a guy demanded the dealer replace his worn out rear tire--every few weeks. The dealer refused after the second one, and the customer reached out to us, demanding help. I sent a rep out to the scene, and wouldn't you know it, the customer was the problem. It turned out he would butt the front end of the running bike up against his garage wall and go through the gears over and over until the tire was worn out! We never knew why.

My team was always on top of new stuff. We met once a week to network on things we were dealing with. We also met quarterly with Honda's legal staff to catch up on what we could say to the public, how to get our finger on the pulse of the end user, and the legal dept's stand on things perceived by the public as defects. For example, Honda denied warranty assistance for first-gen V4 owners who put sidecars on their bikes and the frame tubes subsequently separated at the welds.

At one time I assisted Honda's New Jersey office in facilitating the early 1980s Honda Civic rust recall. I was unprepared for the offers of bribes and influence on the part of the customers calling in: "Can yuse get me eh deal on the pawts?" The warranty team back at the home office also met regularly to hammer out the "goodwill" dollar amount cap for each fiscal quarter. "Goodwill" is the term used to describe warranty assistance outside the warranty period. It gets its name partly from an attempt to circumvent law that did not allow special treatment for some and not for others, but also has a more legitimate meaning, refering to repurchase intention on the part of the customer--his "goodwill".

Most of the calls from customers about their dealers were concerning how they were treated, whether or not an actual problem with the bike was involved. The average dealer seemed to not have very good customer relations. We got to know who out there in dealerland was being good to their customers. And who wasn't. American Honda stepped in pretty often, but in the end, legalities meant it was only the dealer who could resolve the issue, and our work was mainly cajoling him to do so. Honda could not force him to do the right thing. As already mentioned, Big Four manufacturers have almost no say over their dealers, and even if they had, the non-franchise nature of their relationship prevents the manufacturer from taking control.

The customer service team also provided home office support to the field staff, what many call service reps. The customer or dealer would call in with the problem, then often as not the field rep would later check in and either consult with us on the issue or learn about it for the first time. We worked well together, and though this was more than forty years ago, to this day I remember most of these field guys' names. In a way it was pretty exciting. We were on the bleeding edge of emerging technical issues, in the context of their appearing on customers' bikes and how they challenged the capability of the dealer network. One of the things I will always remember is how many of the field guys--I respected them immensely and in fact wanted to eventually join them--would come up with field fixes that even after Japan dressed them up in company packaging, bore the unmistakable stamp of hard-working professional mechanics and their innovative and thoughtful problem-solving. This was especially observable during the introduction of the CBX and the Honda Turbo, and later the first-gen V4s, so it was really interesting.

Years later at another corporate office--Kawasaki’s--in addition to managing all things dealer training including the company's first ever mechanics recognition program and the creation of the dealer training on the then-new, superlative, supercharged 320-hp Ninja H2R--I trained company departments whose staff were non-techical and thus not versed in Kawasaki's major systems such as ABS, traction control, power modes, ECO, secondary throttles, anti-back torque, and of course a whole lot more. Even the legal department, made up of some really interesting but technically-unaware folks, appreciated learning about systems they only knew the company's marketing names for and nothing about how they worked. I also trained Kawasaki media personnel, actually several different teams that went out into the public during industry events and answered questions for prospective Kawasaki motorcycle buyers, including Kawasaki's Ticket to Ride group who traveled all over the country with a semi truck and trailer taking bikes to events for the public to test ride. And I trained the guys on the dealer-only tech line who basically did hand-holding for dealers who didn't understand how to use a laptop to make adjustments to fuel injection and diagnose onboard electronics.

This then is an inside look. The average motorcycle owner is unaware of the manufacturer ethos, what it thinks and believes and its abiding principles. Here’s something though. Honda has published sanctions against pressure-washing, yet most of the industry—including Honda dealers—continues to practice it. Suzuki has told its dealers to stop lapping valves, yet this is still very common in powersports. Why isn't the consumer aware of such things as this and that Honda and Kawasaki have both endorsed Sta-Bil almost from the very beginning, and Yamaha and Suzuki have taught their dealers some of the best, most practical ignition and charging system troubleshooting techniques that exist anywhere? It is a mystery, but more than that, it emphasizes the inexplicable disconnect between the manufacturer and the public.