Qualla: Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buch-t, Public domain. On 1 May 1913, at an agricultural machinery works in the village of Korvensuu in Mynämäki, Frans Engelbert Lindström's men finished a car. It had a ten-horsepower air-cooled two-cylinder engine, side valves on the exhaust and atmospheric inlet valves that answered to nothing but suction, and almost every component had been made in Finland. It was built to show what the factory could do. Nobody built a second one. That prototype, generally reckoned the first car manufactured in Finland, has sat since 2008 about thirty kilometres northwest of where it was made, in a museum hall a few hundred metres from a plant that has since assembled more than 1.9 million cars.

Image: Buch-t | Public domain

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: The Car That Was Never Built Twice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antti Bilund, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Korvensuu is easy to underestimate. It looks like what it is, a machine shop's demonstration piece, closer in spirit to a threshing machine than to anything from Stuttgart. But look at the year. In 1912 and 1913, when Lindström's works designed and built it, there was no Finn...

Image: Antti Bilund | CC BY-SA 3.0

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: An Automotive Industry City

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The museum exists because a factory manager wanted his town's identity written down. In 1982 Juhani Linnoinen, then chief executive of Oy Saab-Valmet Ab, proposed a car museum for Uusikaupunki on the grounds that it had become, in his words, an automotive industry city. It was no...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: The Saab Room

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 4.0. One section belongs entirely to Saab, and this is the part that visitors from Sweden tend to stand in for a long time. Between 1969 and 2003 the plant across the fence built 95s, 96s, 99s, 90s, 900s and 9000s, the 900 and 9-3 convertibles, the 9-3 Viggen, and the long-wheelbase F...

Image: Tiia Monto | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: Mopeds, Motorcycles, Two Aeroplanes

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buch-t, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Beyond the Saabs the collection widens out considerably, in the way that collections built by enthusiasts always do. Three exhibition halls hold roughly a hundred cars, a run of mopeds, a handful of motorcycles, and, for reasons that make sense only once you accept that the line ...

Image: Buch-t | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Uusikaupunki Automobile Museum: The Workshop at the Back

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anssi Koskinen, CC BY 2.0. There is a restoration workshop attached, handling maintenance, restoration and upholstery for vintage cars. That detail says more about the place than the exhibit list does. A museum with a working shop is not primarily in the business of display; it is in the business of keepin...

Image: Anssi Koskinen | CC BY 2.0