Honda Sneaks up on Big Three

[BGH]

H onda Motor Co.'s Asimo is no ordinary robot. With its latest upgrade, the 4-foot Asimo, who occasionally greets visitors in English and Japanese at Honda's Tokyo headquarters, can calculate how fast people are walking and keep pace with them.
The same ingenuity and engineering skill that produced Asimo have pushed Honda to the forefront in developing futuristic fuel-cell cars. As volatile gas prices are shifting U.S. consumers' interest to more fuel-efficient models, Honda is the only automaker with a fuel-cell car certified for U.S. retail buyers, and it has leased two hydrogen-powered FCX cars to customers to monitor their performance under real-life conditions.
Detroit's automakers are fixating on Toyota Motor Corp. as their biggest threat, but Honda, Japan's No. 2 carmaker, is also gaining on them. Together, Toyota and Honda account for a fourth of U.S. auto sales, and half the vehicles sold here by foreign automakers. While Honda may not be growing as fast as Toyota, which has 15.4 percent of the market, it has expanded steadily. Over the past 10 years, Honda has increased its U.S. market share 50 percent to 9.1 percent.


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