News — Seiko
Seiko Puts Honda’s Folding Scooter on a 36mm Field Watch
The Seiko 5 Sports HDB010 marks the Honda Motocompo with a 36.4mm case, a yellow dial and a run of 8,000 pieces. It lands in September at AUD 575.
Hen & Mills Editorial · 3 min read · 6 August 2026
Honda built the Motocompo to solve a problem almost nobody else was trying to solve. In the first half of the 1980s it sold a 49cc two-stroke scooter that folded into a box and slid into the boot of the Honda City, bought as a factory accessory for the car rather than as a machine in its own right. Roughly 53,000 were built.
Seiko has now put it on a watch, and the watch is small on purpose.
What Seiko has actually built
The Seiko 5 Sports HDB010 is a limited edition of 8,000 pieces. The case is stainless steel with a hard coating, 36.4mm across, 12.5mm thick and 44.4mm lug to lug, under a curved Hardlex crystal. Water resistance is 10 bar and magnetic resistance is 4,800 A/m.
Inside is Seiko's calibre 4R36, automatic with manual winding, 24 jewels, a power reserve of approximately 41 hours, a stop-seconds function and a day and date display. The band is nylon, with an 18mm lug width, and LumiBrite sits on the hands and indexes.
A 36.4mm case is genuinely compact by current standards. On a watch built around a scooter designed to fold into a car boot, that is the joke landing properly.
The dial
The dial is Motocompo yellow, cut across the centre by a grey band carrying the Honda logo. AUTOMATIC sits below it in the same pixelated typeface Honda used on the scooter's bodywork, and the day and date window is at three o'clock. The seconds hand is tipped in red.
The strap continues it. The nylon band is printed with the Motocompo's own graphics, and the keepers are marked CARRYING POINT, a reference to the handles that let you pick the thing up and put it in your car.
The case back
The case back is where the collaboration earns its keep. Behind a red-tinted see-through screw back sits a silhouette of the Motocompo in its folded form, with the Honda logo above it and LIMITED EDITION below. Each piece is numbered, and Seiko's own photography shows 0001/8000.
The box
The packaging is a small piece of design in itself. The outer carton is printed as a Motocompo shipping box, complete with a line drawing of the scooter, Honda's logo and モトコンポ in katakana down the side. Lift the lid and the tray is Motocompo yellow.
Price and availability
Seiko lists the HDB010 at AUD 575, with a September 2026 release. That puts it in the middle of the 5 Sports range, above the standard SRPG-series pieces and below the GMT models.
Worth a look?
If you have any affection for Honda's early 1980s experiments, this is an easy one at the price. It is a 4R36 in a genuinely small case, with a day-date, 10 bar of water resistance and a decorated see-through back.
The more interesting question is what it says about sizing. Seiko has spent years being asked for smaller watches, and here is a 36.4mm sports piece released as a limited edition rather than a core model. If the 8,000 pieces move quickly, that is a useful signal about what people actually want on the wrist.
