Two-wheeler major, Royal Enfield has started commercial production of vehicles at its new manufacturing facility at Oragadam, near Chennai in Tamil Nadu.

The facility spreading across 50 acres, will have a production capacity of 1,50,000 units. The company began production at the facility, which uses state-of-the-art modular structure to produce one Royal Enfield a minute, on Tuesday, 30 April, 2013.

The company is aiming to produce and sell 1.75 lakh units in 2013 and further increase it to 2.5 lakh units by 2014 in the country. The company has been able to sell 1,13,000 units in the previous year and has been growing at the rate of 50 per cent over recent years. Royal Enfield already has 50,000 bookings with long waiting time running into months for its models across the country.

The company said that the added capacity will help reduce the waiting time that ranges between 6 to 12 months depending on the model and variant. The existing plant at Tiruvottiyur will compliment operations at Oragadam by producing engines and giving finishing touches to the models.

Siddharth Lal, MD & CEO, Eicher Motors said, "We have been extremely successful in stretching the capacity of our existing 60 year old plant to record levels - achieving production of over 12,000 motorcycles in the month of March 2013. Yet the demand has outpaced supply. Therefore we have conceived this new facility in a much larger manufacturing facility which will take the eventual production here to over 500,000 per year."