Pros
The company treats you well in the beginning. There are also many young people with high ideals. Cafeteria is good and the uniform system removes the whole "what should I wear" dilemma we may face if we work at other companies once we decide to leave Honda. The location is quite bucolic, and thus traffic is very nice. No hustle & bustle here! Nice place to live if you like hunting or farming, etc. Also, of you want a laid-back work style, this is the place.
Cons
Honestly, a person who has only worked at this company for 1 year or less (co-ops included) shouldn't write reviews, nor should they think they know enough to discredit other reviews... oh the naivete! Either that or there's some whitewashing going on despite all the bad news that is leaking out of R&D. Honda R&D is basically a place that offers sub-standard pay for the work they require, promotions are very rare and some managers do their darndest to make sure you do not get promoted, and time-off policies are draconian and unnecessarily bureaucratic. There is an amazing level of politics that happen from the upper echleons to the lowest of rungs. You would not see this until you have spent at least three years at the company, so I suggest any reviews from people who spent less than that to be taken with a grain of overly positive salt. The place also has a severe lack of diversity. By that, I don't only mean racial / ethnic diversity, gender, or religion, but also a total lack of diversity in terms of the type of engineering and research being conducted. The approach is always extremely conservative and never pro-active. Basically, any new idea gets rejected unless it has already been tried in a number of other major automotive companies. The top management members are generally oblivious to new technology (many of them are former aircraft industry folks who have formed a clique and only seem to promote guys from within that clique) and tend to make strange decisions despite being presented with monumental data stating otherwise (cost is basically the largest deciding factor). Politics is quite extreme in this company. There are a surprising number of people with grudges both real and imagined who pull each other's legs and get in the way of completing business. Design an purchasing can never get along as well, but the core problem is a lack of a clear decision-making flow that is endorsed and enforced by top-management. Instead, top management seems to "let it be" and allow inefficiency to exist while at the same time expecting underlings to come up with some magical way to reduce overhead.