Coffee and donuts video, Ming is done restoring the first Honda imported to the USA, this 30 minute video sums it all up

https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2019/06/21/first-honda-in-the-us-n600-series-1

Early cars were fragile, far from the reliable mules Honda is known for building today. They required service every 2,000 miles, including an oil change and valve adjustment, due to the air-cooled design and the fact that both the engine and transmission share the same lubrication.

Bob Hansen was one of the first Americans to work for Honda; he set up bike dealerships in the Midwest in late ’59.

He was put in charge of a convoy of winter test vehicles, so he took them to Wisconsin, where he was from. This is when Honda realized the car’s shortcomings for the American market–bad heaters, poor brakes. That Wisconsin trip is when the engineers saw that it pulls air through the engine and into the cabin. That gets loud, and if there’s an exhaust leak, the drivers could fall asleep. Also, if you hit a puddle or it rains, that heater will fog the windshield right now.

When the fleet returned to Gardena, California, where Honda was based; Bob asked the bosses what to do with the cars, and he was advised to destroy them.

So he sold them as scrap to the salvage yard down the street, and two days later, Bob saw one driving down the road. The owner of the yard sold three of ’em instead of crushing them as agreed. Then Bob personally saw the other 47 get crushed. Whether it was by chance or by design, one of the three N600s that escaped was Serial Number One. It ended up in Arkansas, the other two were 44 and 47.

https://www.hemmings.com/blog/article/saving-1000001-1967-honda-n600/
https://jalopnik.com/heres-what-happened-to-americas-first-honda-1787945409

Paint and body work by John Carambia Hemet Ca., master metal shaper, body work, and paint, he shot Bruce Meyers’ Pebble Beach-winning ’32 Ford roadster in the late 1990s

Now that Serial Number One is back in Honda’s hands after a half-century’s absence, now cherished where it was once considered disposable, there’s still the question of what Tim will do with Numbers 44 and 47. “Number 44 will be restored, a twin to Number One. Number 47 will be a copy of a car that RSC [Honda’s racing division] had–a road racer with a full cage.

Also on the docket: restoring one of just three 1969 AA600s with the original three-speed Hondamatic.

The Hondamatic was nothing more than an exercise to skirt the patents owned by GM; most companies wanting to use an automatic had to pay GM a licensing fee, and Mr. Honda said no. So the Hondamatic is a proprietary transmission–the first step forward in making a true Honda-designed automatic.