(FORTUNE Magazine) – As his father tells it, the first words ever spoken by Nobuhiko Kawamoto, the new president of Honda Motor, sounded like a car engine revving up. As a student at Tohoku University, the young Kawamoto often skipped classes to reassemble rusty prewar Buicks and Cadillacs. Nowadays, Kawamoto, 54, rises at four on Sundays to take mountain drives with his wife in his 1964 Porsche or his 1955 Triumph two-seater. Says he: ''I entered this business to have fun with cars.'' The new boss fits Honda's mold in that he's not a marketing or financial whiz but an engineer like all his predecessors, including current CEO Tadashi Kume, who steps down June 28. The tradition stretches back to founder Soichiro Honda, a self-educated race car driver who began making motorcycles in 1947. Honda is something of a maverick company. It entered Europe, for example, through a joint venture rather than building its own plants like Toyota and Nissan. In the U.S., Honda's auto sales are on full throttle, largely because its Accord is the top-selling car. But the company missed the craze for minivans and trucks, and Kawamoto will have to work hard to keep the company on its current worldwide roll.

Says Kawamoto of the challenge ahead: ''Customers want new cars every few years, and the environment needs different types of cars. We're creating a global manufacturing system that has flexibility from country to country, factory to factory, line to line, model to model.''