The Douai Renault factory is a car plant belonging to the Renault Group, opened in 1970 at

Douai Douai (, , ,; pcd, Doï; nl, Dowaai; formerly spelled Douay or Doway in English) is a city in the Nord département in northern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department. Located on the river Scarpe some from Lille and from Arras, Do ...

in the industrial basin of the Nord department, not far from Lille (Rijsel).

History

Construction of the plant received a go-ahead in 1968, with a formal announcement of the project coming a year later. Douai was chosen because it was well located at the heart of the industrial centre of gravity of the

EEC The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organization created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisb ...

with excellent road links to major industry and population centres. It was also in an area with a large pool of available workers, due to the running down of

coal mining Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

in the area. The first car put into serial production at the plant was the Renault 5, initially in small batches, starting early in 1975. The principal production location for the little car was, and remained, at Flins, however. Towards the end of 1975 production started at Douai, in much larger batches, of the Renault 14, building up stock ahead of the launch of Renault's first head-on

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competitor in 1976. Volumes in 1976 were 325 Renault 14 and 50 R5's per diem. The plant has continued to specialise in the manufacture of cars in the

small family car The C-segment is the 3rd category of the European segments for passenger cars and is described as "medium cars". It is equivalent to the Euro NCAP "small family car" size class, and the compact car category in the United States. In 2011, the C- ...

segment. By 1977 the plant was employing 7,000 people. This was a period of rapid automation in car production, and as a new plant Douai was more highly automated than most. It was perhaps a reflection of the fact that all the jobs at the plant were then new jobs, that the robots were viewed with some affection by some members of the workforce. At the end of the body assembly shop much of the main welding together of the pressed panels was undertaken by a team of four "Unimate" robots christened, by their human colleagues, Theophile, Arsine, Marcel and Modeste. Visitors at this time were also impressed by the ample space in the plant available for further expansion. However, in 2008 Douai suffered a blow when production of mainstream Renault Mégane model was concentrated on the

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plant: hitherto the two plants had assembled the model in parallel, but sales volumes no longer justified that arrangement. Douai retained the sporty low volume Mégane CC Coupé and Cabriolet.

Production

Historical production

The following Renault models have been manufactured at Douai: * Renault 5 (1972–1985) * Renault 14 (1976–1983) * Renault 9/ Renault 11 (1981–1989) *

Renault 19 The Renault 19 is a small family car that was produced by the French car manufacturer Renault between 1988 and 1996. In Turkey and in Argentina, production continued until 2000. The internal development code for the 19 was X53, with the five doo ...

(1988–1996) * Renault Mégane I (1996–2002) * Renault Scénic I (4X2 and RX4) (1996–2003) * Renault Mégane II (saloon and coupé) (2003–2009) * Renault Scénic II (2003–2009) * Renault Grand Scénic II (2003–2009) * Renault Scénic III (2009–2015) * Renault Grand Scénic III (2009–2015) * Renault Talisman (2015–2022) * Renault Scénic IV (2016–2022)

Current production

* Renault Espace V (2015–present)

Future production

* Renault 5 EV (2023)

References

{{Coord, 50, 21, 50, N, 3, 1, 40, E, region:FR_type:landmark, display=title Buildings and structures in Pas-de-Calais 1970 establishments in France Renault Motor vehicle assembly plants in France