Honda Motocompacto Concept

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If you’ve ever seen a Honda Motocompo in person, they are just, like, so cool, my dudes. (Honda/)

Logically the Honda Motocompo, which was sold in Japan from 1981 to 1983, should be nothing more than a minor curiosity in the history of motorcycling. It proved less popular than expected and was discontinued after only two years, but Honda has been constantly revisiting the idea ever since and now looks set to launch a 21st-century take on the Motocompo under the name “Motocompacto.”

In case it passed you by, the original Motocompo was a tiny folding scooter powered by a 49cc air-cooled two-stroke single. Its bars and seat could be packed away into its own rectangular bodywork to make a conveniently shaped package small enough to be slotted into the trunk of a car. In fact, there was a specific car for it, the Japanese-market Honda City, and these days a matching City and Motocompo commands substantial money on the used market.

The idea was that you’d drive your car to a parking lot outside of the city center, pull out your Motocompo, unfold it, and ride the last couple of miles to the office to avoid nasty congestion. The bike was small enough to be put in the corner of a room or even under your desk until your commute home. Perfect, in theory, for the legendary congestion in cities like Tokyo.

In reality, hefting the Motocompo in and out of a car is a workout, the folding mechanism isn’t as simple as it might appear, and the two-stroke power meant both your car and your clothes would reek of fuel. Honda hoped to sell 10,000 of them per month, but in two years only sold around 50,000.

More than 20 years ago, Honda was playing with the concept and still hasn’t thrown in the towel. (Honda/)

But the idea hasn’t died, and foldable Motocompo-style machines have been regular concepts at shows in the years since, often with electric powertrains that fix at least some of the flaws of the original. In 2001, Honda showed the e-Dax and e-NSR, a duo of tiny, folding electric bikes with hub-mounted motors, and in 2011 the battery-powered Moto Compo concept appeared at the Tokyo Motor Show alongside a matching concept car, to revive the idea of a two-wheeler that emerges from a larger four-wheeler.

The 2011, Moto Compo prototype. (Honda/)
Like the original Motocompo, which was designed to be carried in Honda’s City automobile, the Motocompacto concept carries on that idea. (Honda/)

Although we haven’t seen a new concept or production bike in recent years, the spirit of the Motocompo lives on, and in 2020 Honda filed for trademark rights on the name “Motocompacto,” a trademark it still holds in several countries, the US included. Specifically, the Motocompacto trademark is intended for “self-balancing electric scooters.” More than two years on, the project appears to have taken another step closer to reality as Honda has now filed for IP protection of a logo to go with the Motocompacto name, giving our first glimpse of what the bike to use it might look like.

The logo shows the outline of a box-shaped machine, with a pair of wheels, some bars and a seat emerging from it. It’s unlike the original Motocompo in that respect, although the new bike appears even squarer, like a trunk on wheels. That’s probably exactly what it will be, although the logo itself is clearly a very simplified version of the idea, like an avatar to represent the bike rather than a scale illustration of the machine.

Given that the original Motocompo was very much a Japanese-market machine, the Motocompo trademarks, both for the name and the logo, have emerged from North America. The initial 2020 release was from the US and, in November 2022, a further two applications were made in Canada, including one showing the new logo. Stay tuned.

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