Two days ago, I left Vermont on a cross-country road trip to Columbus, Ohio, where I have a co-op job at Honda of America Manufacturing. I haven’t seen much of the area yet, since I’ve been unpacking and getting settled, so these are just some preliminary snapshots of the area.
I stayed the night in Batavia, NY to break the trip into two six-hour chunks. That morning was the only time I saw direct sunlight the whole trip. It rained almost continuously for two days.
It was also an unusual heat wave. In Erie, PA, in the dead of winter, it was 72 degrees F. Here and there are signs of the Rust Belt.
Past Cleveland, the last of the hills faded away. With nothing to obstruct them, the roads out here continue in a straight line for miles at a time.
Honda set me up in a very nice, fully furnished 2-bedroom 2-bath apartment in this housing development, in a sea of cookie cutter housing developments. Some planner sprinkled traffic circles everywhere like confetti; I can’t go anywhere without crossing at least two rotaries, often four or five. That’s the upper-middle-class aesthetic of this area.
Walking around, I noticed swaths of land being cleared for yet more development, and entrances to these developments have already been built into the roads that crisscross the suburb. Columbus must be expanding. It certainly has room to grow.
Driving to the Marysville plant, you first pass the shiny new Honda heritage center, a sort of museum of their company. Then you reach the edge of this city-sized factory. Every Honda Accord you have ever seen was built here, as well as its Acura siblings, the TLX and ILX. Acres of cars sit behind it, waiting to be shipped across the country. Hondas are not American cars, but many (the Accord, the CR-V) are produced with American labor, and have been since 1982.
When you finally pass this behemoth, you find the Performance Manufacturing Center, a smaller, newer factory that produces the world’s stock of the Acura NSX supercar. Beyond that, a huge test track can be seen on satellite view, part of the Transportation Research Center.
I don’t yet know what kind of new technology I’ll be testing, and once I do, I won’t be allowed to share specifics. I know most companies are working on more intelligent cruise control, some aiming for full autonomy. Honda will certainly be working on something along these lines. They are also sure to be developing fully electric vehicles, and expanding their plug-in hybrid offerings, as many of their competitors are doing.