Saab-Valmet was founded in 1968, a marriage between the Finnish state industrial group Valmet and Swedish Saab-Scania, and the plant went up at Uusikaupunki. For the first eleven years it built nothing but Saabs, and it kept building them until 2003: the 95, 96, 99, 90, 900 and its convertible, the 9000, the 9-3 and its convertible, and the hard-edged 9-3 Viggen. Two models existed largely because Finland asked for them. The long-wheelbase "Finlandia" combi-coupé version of the 99 and the four-door Saab 900 CD were built here for Finnish ministries, municipalities and industrial boards, who wanted a car with genuine rear legroom and no foreign flag on it. For thirty-four years, a Swedish marque's most distinctive variants came from a Finnish town most Swedes could not place on a map.

In 1979 Valmet went looking for a second customer and found a hard one. The company wanted to build the compact Simca-Talbot Horizon; the French would not license it unless Valmet also assembled the larger, slower-selling 1307. So Uusikaupunki took both, along with the Solara, and turned out 31,978 Talbots between 1979 and 1985. Unlike the Saabs, these were meant strictly for the domestic market, with only a contractual sliver of hope that Finnish-made parts might one day be exported to Talbot's own plants. What the deal did produce was a supply chain: some thirty local firms fed the line, and within half a year of start-up the Finnish parts content had reached thirty percent. The Talbots are long gone. The suppliers, and the knowledge of how to stand up a new model quickly, stayed.

After Talbot, the pattern set. Opel Calibras from 1991 to 1997. Lada EuroSamaras, reworked for western buyers, from 1996 to 1998. Then the long Porsche era, Boxsters and Caymans from 1997 to 2011, which is what put Uusikaupunki into car enthusiasts' vocabulary. Electric work began early, with the Garia golf car and the Think City from 2009. The Fisker Karma came in 2011 and left in 2012 when Fisker collapsed. Mercedes-Benz has been the anchor since: the W176 A-Class from August 2013, the GLC from 2017 to 2022, the W177 A-Class from August 2018, and the Mercedes-AMG GT four-door coupé from 2023. Two solar-car contracts, Lightyear and Sono Motors, were signed and then cancelled when the customers ran out of money. Alongside all this the company bought Karmann's roof business in November 2010, and now supplies convertible roofs, active spoilers and charging flaps to Mercedes, BMW, Mini, Bentley, McLaren and Porsche.

The electric turn came as a separate business line, renamed IONCOR in 2024. Large-scale production of 48-volt systems started at Salo in 2019, with high-voltage capacity added in the summer of 2021. That September a battery plant opened at Uusikaupunki itself, so that high-voltage packs and the cars they go into are now made under one roof, and a third plant followed at Kirchardt in Germany in 2023. Testing and engineering sites are scattered across Bad Friedrichshall, Weihenbronn, Munich and Turku. Then, in September 2025, the structure changed: IONCOR was separated off to Finnish Minerals Group, a fully state-owned company building out Finland's battery value chain, and the Finnish state took majority ownership of Valmet Automotive itself with 79 percent, leaving Pontos Group as a 21 percent minority owner.

The reason for that restructuring showed up quickly. European car demand was weak, and Valmet's answer was to sell the one thing it has always actually sold: the ability to run complex serial production. In December 2025 it agreed with Sisu Auto to manufacture military vehicles and components. In February 2026 came a preliminary deal with Jeti Industries for series production of electric buses, and in April a long-term arrangement with Carrus Delta to build coach bodies. In June 2026 the company announced a significant expansion of its work with Patria on armoured vehicles. The 2025 results, published that April, showed profitability back in positive territory on the strength of these new industries while automotive stayed soft. About 1,600 people work across the three countries, from more than fifty nationalities, most of them in Finland.