Born from nothing
In an era before PowerPoint, Elliott and assistant Tom Umeno carried a stack of 11-inch-by-17-inch charts on a plane to Japan and presented the idea for a luxury channel to Honda's top R&D executives.
"It was designed to be an intercept brand, to capture owners of Japanese products before they moved up to BMW and Mercedes," Elliott said.
Acura never reached the prestige or sales levels achieved by Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which have battled for luxury-brand leadership in recent years. Acura peaked at 209,610 units in 2005, but then went into a four-year slide before rebounding 26 percent last year to 133,606.
Lexus, which arrived in 1990, left Acura in the dust as Toyota poured far more resources into its luxury-brand project. But Acura was the trailblazer.
Elliott said the idea of a new brand was not a difficult sell to Honda's leaders in Japan.
Now all American Honda needed to do was create a brand from nothing, persuade dealers to take on the franchise and plan the marketing launch. Then there was the matter of convincing Americans that Japanese cars--still mocked by Detroit as discarded beer cans--could be luxury vehicles.
Jeff Conrad, who today is Acura's top executive, was a young Honda employee in those days, watching from a distance as Honda gave birth to a brand.
"It was a risky proposition, no doubt," Conrad said.
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