Construction of the plant received a go-ahead in 1968, with a formal announcement of the project coming a year later.

[1] The first car put into serial production at the plant was the Renault 5, initially in small batches, starting early in 1975.

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.

[1] However, in 2008 Douai suffered a blow when production of mainstream Renault Mégane model was concentrated on the Palencia 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.