Royal Enfield: The Oldest Motorcycle Brand Still in Production

There is a factory in Chennai, India, that turns out close to a million motorcycles a year. The bikes rolling off that line trace their DNA back 124 years to a small engineering works in Redditch, England, where two businessmen had just bought a needle manufacturer and had no particular plan to stay in the needle business.

That origin story, needles to motorcycles, England to India, near-bankruptcy to global growth, is one of the stranger ones in two-wheel history. And the fact that Royal Enfield has been building motorcycles without interruption since 1901 makes it something no other brand can honestly claim: the oldest motorcycle manufacturer still in continuous production.