I am looking forward to seeing a Royal Enfield factory video showing a modern assembly line like other large motorcycle manufacturers have, instead of a factory with hundreds of young men in blue uniforms wandering around in circles occupying space and looking confused.
Here is a video of the BMW factory building their C-Evolution electric scooter. Note the lack of hundreds of young men wandering around in circles occupying space and looking confused: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrE2Q4culaU
I think I know
just the Enfield factory video you're talking about, and yeah--not exactly single-minded Teutonic efficiency on display there.
Still, even though the "sensible" part of me knows full well that I could fly back to my old home of Berlin, pick up one of those C-Evolution scooters at the factory there, and then drive it or any other current-day BMW motorcycle touring the length and breadth of Europe (presumably on a never-ending hunt for charging stations in the case of that C-Evolution all-electric scooter) without ever so much as glancing at the tool kit, the "sensitive" part of me would
FAR rather do that trip on a well found mid-'60s
R69S, or better yet, my old '57 Zündapp Bella R201 scooter, which has already gotten me over the Alps
several times. There is perhaps NO better vehicle upon which to saunter into a small town Italian piazza than a
Zündapp Bella. Mine's maroon and black, but here's one in suitably "waspy trim" in deference to the predominant local scoot (Italian: "
come una Vespa"):
Marvelous-handling rides, they are, with those big tires and leading-link suspension, and SO flawlessly engineered and constructed, and get this: "bullet-proof" reliable electric start...In the '50s
!So, all in all you see, I am more eager to take on the challenge of coaxing some living fossilized example of bygone technology happily down the road, my cast iron engined Enfield, than I am with embracing
practical maintenance-free futurity. If that takes indulging that elderly dude in Chennai just wandering around with the broom wrong side up with that rather faraway glaze in his eyes, then so be it. Your mileage may vary.