Honda S500

The Honda S500 is one of 277 Honda models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1963. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Honda S500 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Pontiac Pontiac GTO, the Aston Martin Aston Martin DB5, the Buick Buick Riviera — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Honda S500 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 531 cc DOHC I4; kerb weight is recorded at 680 kg; top speed is given as 129 km/h; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear. Production is recorded at 1,363 units, which makes it a limited-production machine by any standard.

Its place in the Honda story

Within Honda's own catalogue the Honda S500 sits alongside the Honda Envix, the Honda Crider, the HPD ARX-03, the Honda 0 SUV. It was succeeded by the Honda S600. Assembly is recorded at Hamamatsu factory, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Honda S500 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.