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Posted Feb 8, 2023, 6:02 PM
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你的媽媽
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: The Bay
Posts: 9,718
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I don't really have much confidence in VinFast making it after reading this article. Very interesting read. I'll just include some snippets.
Quote:
The VinFast VF8 Is Simply Not Ready for America
The electric-car startup brought me to its Vietnam headquarters to drive its first EV meant for the U.S. market. It was the most bizarre experience of my life.
By Kevin Williams Published December 14, 2022
I was in Vietnam to sample the automotive fruits of VinFast; the fast-moving automotive startup had just begun selling electric cars in its home country and was already promising to bring them to the United States. I definitely learned something about VinFast, but it wasn’t exactly what the company wanted me to see.
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VinFast came onto the car scene in 2017. Its first products were rebodied vehicles from major automakers, styled by Pininfarina and intended to be sold both in Vietnam and the United States. The VinFast Lux A 2.0 was based on the BMW 530i, the VinFast Lux SA 2.0 was a modified BMW X5, and the subcompact VinFast Fadil was a restyled Chevy Spark. The limited-run 500-unit President SUV was a Lux SA with a General Motors V8 under the hood in place of the BMW engine.
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In January 2022, VinFast announced its intention to end production of internal-combustion vehicles and shift to a full EV lineup. Gone would be the BMW- and GM-based designs, replaced with electric vehicles developed from the ground up by VinFast. The company poached top-tier engineering talent, including former GM employees who had worked on the revolutionary Ultium EV platform.
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On September 18, I joined a group of nearly a hundred journalists, influencers, hopeful VinFast customers, and employees on a chartered flight from San Francisco to Vietnam. Our group crossed the international date line and deplaned near Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From the airport, we took a bus and a boat to VinPearl Ha Long Bay, a resort on a private island owned by Vingroup.
...
To me, it seemed like Vingroup would rather us be entertained only by what it could control. The company wanted us to experience its outrageous, larger-than-life projects. It threw us huge parties on private islands, complete with entertainment from big-name Vietnamese pop stars, and wanted us to be impressed by its barren yet grandiose VinUniversity. I couldn’t help but recall Tran Van Hoang, a Vietnamese automotive YouTuber who was visited by police and sued by VinFast after expressing complaints about his Lux A2.0 sedan.
Every brand works to control the narrative around its products. It’s why every major automaker engages in the same basic practice: flying journalists to a scenic location to wine and dine them and let them drive brand-new cars on a vetted route to write about the experience. But the way VinFast, and in turn Vingroup, handled that task felt maybe a little threatening. I didn’t fly halfway around the world for a university tour. VinFast had spent hours entertaining us — including a wordless pantomime stage performance at dinner one night, featuring a projection-mapped castle claimed to have cost millions of dollars but identical to the tech used in student art projects at colleges everywhere — and we still hadn’t driven a single vehicle. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the hospitality. I just wanted to learn whether the cars were any good.
If my initial drive of a pre-production VinFast VF8 the next day is anything to go by, the answer is: No, the cars are not very good at all.
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The VinFast VF8 is a compact-ish midsize EV crossover, with 350 horsepower in Eco trim and 402 HP in the Plus trim. Even with the generally higher curb weight inherent to an electric vehicle, 350 horsepower should be enough to scoot the VF8 around with authority. Yet throughout my time behind the wheel, the VF8 felt like it had barely half that output. I drove every pre-production vehicle VinFast brought to the event; all of them felt slow, and their performance was inconsistent.
The ride and handling were even worse. As VinFast bussed us from place to place, I noticed that company reps would always follow us in a few VF8s. Much of Vietnam’s highway system is brand-new and very smooth, but the VF8s were constantly bounding up and down, with poor suspension control that was visible from the bus. I shooed it away, figuring that the VinFast team was driving development mules that didn’t represent the near-final cars I was under the impression we would be driving.
Nope. Driving one VF8 after another around VinFast’s private island test course, my experience was exactly what I had seen as the VinFast folks tailed us around north Vietnam. Even on the island resort’s glass-smooth roads, the VF8 bucked and bounced as if the car was on cut springs. The steering was dead and nonlinear, paired with tires that gave up grip at the slightest bit of cornering verve, though I’m not sure how much of a dynamic impression one can get on a closed course on a private resort island.
Annoyed, but still striving to be open-minded, I approached a VinFast engineering representative. Company spokespeople had claimed the VF8s we drove were Vietnamese production spec; I wanted to know what changes were in store for the US market. Yet again, the spokesperson reiterated that the VF8 was just a few software tweaks away from a US-market debut — implying that the chassis calibration was finalized.
To say I was frustrated would have been the biggest understatement east of the prime meridian. The brand had made such a big damn show — chartering a 20-hour flight, flexing on us with an almost haughty display of this automotive startup and its parent company’s reach into nearly every aspect of Vietnamese life. VinFast reps had bragged about beating their own internal timelines in getting these cars ready for mass production, and judging by the smiles on their faces, it seems like they were all genuinely psyched to show off a product they believed was ready to go toe-to-toe with established automakers. Instead, I’d been flown 8,000 miles to tootle around in a car that clearly wasn’t anywhere near done. I was pissed that the company had wasted my time.
I decided to drive the other VF8 variant, the Plus model, said to have 402 horsepower. It, too, was dog-slow with crap ride quality. Not satisfied with my initial answers, I marched over to the gaggle of VinFast employees, trying to get to the bottom of the car’s poor performance. Eventually, I was led to a main engineer, someone who could answer substantial technical questions about the vehicle.
“So, this car has anywhere from 350 to 402 horsepower, right?” I asked the VinFast engineer. “Why is it so slow?”
“You mean peak horsepower,” he corrected me.
“What?”
“Peak horsepower. The VF8 only has 350 to 402 horsepower when the battery is above 80 percent charge,” the engineer said.
“You do realize that you’ll be the only manufacturer that limits power this severely, right?” I shot back. None of our test cars were fully charged, some of them hovering at 50 percent battery. Even then, that’s not an excuse. I have never driven an EV that reduced power output this dramatically at a routine state of charge. It didn’t seem right.
The VinFast engineers insisted I drive one specific prototype unit they claimed had the “latest and greatest” suspension and software updates. It, too, was pretty shit. The same bouncy, unfinished ride, the same dead steering, and it was only marginally quicker than the others. There were serious power delivery problems, too.
I had gotten tired of the dog and pony show, the over-the-top opulence, and the company’s inability to answer a question. Still, I tried to be diplomatic. I pulled aside VinFast’s U.S. public relations representative. “Baby, you gotta tell ‘em,” I said. “This car ain’t ready.” He reiterated the line I had heard so many times before: That the VF8s we were driving were pre-production models, and I should keep that in mind as I scrutinized their performance.
I’m not naive. I understand a PR rep’s job is to tell journalists what the company wants them to hear. But that’s not enough. In its current state, at the price VinFast wants to charge, the VF8 is a terrible deal. It feels like an underdeveloped, unfinished product that, quite frankly, would be an embarrassment in any market.
...
Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid have had their struggles making cars, but at the end of the day their products are very good. By comparison, VinFast’s efforts feel almost like early Hyundai and Kia; cheap, unrefined, underdeveloped, and not competitive. It took decades for the Korean automakers to shake that reputation; I don’t know if VinFast, or any brand that hopes to break into the mainstream, can afford to come out of the gate in 2022 without a home run.
As of this writing, VinFast says the first 999 US-market VF8s are on a boat that left Vietnam on November 25, en route to the United States. But according to a VinFast representative, the cars have not yet received CARB EO certification, which is required before vehicles can be delivered to customers in California or any other state that follows California’s vehicle regulations. Currently, VinFast has six store locations in the U.S., all in California. The VinFast representative also reiterated the brand’s goal to begin delivering VF8s to US customers “at the end of this year,” and confirmed that the VF9 is still undergoing federal tests and approvals required in the US market.
Whatever the deal, all I know is I flew more than 8,000 miles, learned nothing, and drove a car that was not ready for the United States. Good luck to VinFast, I guess.
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https://jalopnik.com/vinfast-vf8-ele...u-s-1849892217
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