Honda chief: Product development needs more time for quality

Hachigo, an engineer who has worked in the US as well as China, had answers for each question.

For instance, he talked about shipping of the Fit subcompact made in Japan to overseas markets. And he gave the remodeled Civic as an example of a Honda-like product.

Both are not startlingly new ideas. And he kept returning to the themes of greater regional coordination and better communication.

He declined to give numerical goals, acknowledging that the previous one, announced by his predecessor, of reaching a global production scale of 6 million vehicles, would not be attained in the current fiscal year, which ends March 2016.

Hachigo, who joined Honda in 1982, pointed to his career as showing the way for a turnaround.

He noted he has tried to listen to workers on the ground, and that's critical in doing product development correctly, he said.

In the late 1990s, he was involved in the successful introduction of the Odyssey minivan in North America, manufacturing the model at a new plant in Canada.