No, The Honda Super Cub Is Not Being Discontinued Forever

Did you ever play the game of Telephone when you were a kid? 

I don't even know if it's a thing anymore, because I was born in a time before cell phones were a thing. We still had land lines (weird, I know). 

In case you're unfamiliar or need a refresher, roughly the way the game worked was this. One person would make up a short story, or maybe even a sentence, and they'd whisper it into the ear of the next person. And then the second person would try to tell the same story to the next person in the line, and so on. 

The whole point of the game was to see if the story could make it from the first person to the last person and come out sounding anything like how it did at the beginning. Generally, the more people playing the game at once, the more guaranteed chaos you'd have.

Why am I telling you this? Because Honda Japan apparently just went through a Telephone situation. A simple misunderstanding at a shareholder meeting meant that a reporter thought that all the Honda Super Cubs were getting discontinued in 2025; not just the 50cc moped (and Honda's other 50cc mopeds). 

It is, in fact, ONLY the Super Cub 50 that's getting discontinued. The other, larger Super Cub displacements will continue, and a follow-up media roundtable in Japan with Honda GM Minoru Kato confirmed that new Super Cubs that comply with the new emissions standards will continue for the foreseeable future.

There are two lessons we can learn here. The first is if you don't feel like you have a firm grasp on whatever information you're learning, don't be afraid to ask questions until you understand it. To be clear, that means you have to be honest with yourself about what you do and don't know, and where your areas of expertise are (and more importantly, aren't). 

While moto nerds like me are very aware of the fact that there are multiple displacements of Honda Super Cub, that might not be true of a non-moto enthusiast.

Sure, I might live in the US, where we only get the Super Cub 125 (or C125 ABS, as it's designated here). But still, because it's an area of both professional and personal interest, I know that there are also 50cc and 110cc versions sold in other markets. There's also a Cub e: e-bike sold in China, but I digress.

If you don't have the whole picture, it's not difficult to understand how you could become confused. Vespa is another manufacturer that offers some of its models in multiple displacements, with only the number that comes after the model name telling you that they're two different scooters. Look at the Primavera and Sprint lines. There are 50cc and 150cc versions, and as those numbers probably tell you, they're definitely not the same (even if they might look like it on the outside).

The second lesson is, always ask questions about where your information is coming from. Think about who's telling you something, and why. Decide whether you trust their interpretation of the information. People tend to view things through whatever their specialty is, so a business reporter is going to tell you something different about Honda than, say, a motorcycle journalist. 

That's not even to assign any malign intent; just that most people frame new information with what we already know. There's a quote that's been attributed to many people, about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We humans are very like that when learning new information, and we'd do well to keep that in mind. 

Ask questions, always.