Royal Enfield built bikes in India since the beginning of the post colonial period. Basically, for the same reason that H-D is going. The Indians were not going to cooperate without a piece of the action on their home turf. The Chinese have pretty much done the same thing to just about all of the auto manufacturers.
In 1956 Royal Enfield sent the tooling for the 1955 Bullet over to India in order to secure contracts for police and military motorcycle orders from the national and local governments. They continued to manufacture the 1955 Bullet for nearly 50 years.
When the British Royal Enfield activities went under in 1970, an entity with the right to use the name continued in India. They built old technology bikes for the domestic market.
One of the guys who used to work for me got his first job as an Industrial Engineer at Royal Enfield in what was at the time Bombay. He told me that the castings were hand polished, and the guys who had the job of doing the hand polishing exerted so much energy during the day, that the company had to feed them an egg mixture snack at their breaks in order to keep them from wasting away.
When he heard that I had a 1970 British made Royal Enfield Interceptor, he was in awe of its displacement, and suggested that it must be specially made for use with side cars
.
In any event, eventually Royal Enfield India began to export product to the rest of the world, and now they have started moving away from the basic 1955 design, and are including modern technological upgrades.
Honda used to manufacture big displacement bikes (the Gold Wing, and maybe the VTX1800) in Ohio, but they abandoned this activity a few years back. If they had continued to build in Ohio, their pricing in the US would probably be a lot better now than it is. The yen has gained a lot of ground against the dollar in the last few years.
Someone commented that a lot of the H-D chrome is made outside the US. I'm sure that's true ... but equally whacky to me is that just about all of their H-D lifestyle clothing is made in China or other third world factories. They sell the bikes on the theme "buy American," and then they dress up the owners in Chinese togs. Sort of funny, and sad at the same time.
