VinFast Is Going All-Electric, and Worldwide, at Full Speed

• Vinfast is a Vietnamese startup automaker that recently details plans to sell, and eventually build, its vehicles in the United States.

• The Vinfast offerings for our market are the VF8 and the VF9, both EV crossovers.

• The automaker's facility in its home country was coastal swampland in 2017 but is now a modern production facility.

The “FAST” in the VinFast name is an acronym in Vietnamese, representing the stated goals of the company, but it’s not lost on us, or the company’s founders, that in English, it means something done quickly. The new automotive brand was announced in the fall of 2017, and barely a year later VinFast had three gasoline-powered cars available in Vietnam, and an electric scooter factory. By the summer of 2019 the company had completed an 827-acre automotive facility in Hai Phong and was delivering its first cars. As its ICE cars were gaining traction in its home market, VinFast founder Pham Nhat Vuong announced in 2021 that the company would pivot to EVs. By the end of the year, it was selling electric scooters, electric buses, and the VF e34, a small electric SUV about the size of a Toyota C-HR, with promises of two larger models to come, the VF8 and the VF9. The mid-size 5-seat VF 8 and 7-seat VF9 will not only come to the U.S. market but be built here, in a new 2000-acre factory in North Carolina. The goal, said Vuong, is to make VinFast a recognizable name worldwide and, you guessed it, to do it fast.

How It’s Made

VinFast invited us to Vietnam to visit its factory in Hai Phong and to get a sense of the broad range of its parent company VinGroup, with businesses that include hotels, apartments, assembly plants, business parks, schools, and medical research. Everyone we spoke with at VinFast, when asked what the driving force was behind the company’s quick pace and ambitious goals, immediately responded with a story about the chairman, Pham Nhat Vuong.

Pham has a track record of success in unlikely markets. He grew up in Hanoi, where his mother ran a tea shop. He studied in Moscow, then moved to Ukraine where he started a noodle restaurant that became popular enough to spin off into an instant soup company, Technocom. Nestle purchased the brand, and Pham moved back to his homeland, where he began a chain of resorts and became Vietnam’s first billionaire. Personal success might be enough for some, but he wants to make Vietnam a player on the world stage.

“Vietnam is not known for being an industrial country,” Pham says. “It is not known for manufacturing, but we are developing.” He went on to say that he sees VinFast as a leader in the EV market in the future. “Maybe not in five years, but in 10? We want to be at the top.” Why such a quick timeline when other companies take decades to grow? “Life is short, I cannot be slow.”

On a tour of VinFast’s Hai Phong factory, we saw body stampings being made, frames being welded by some 1200 robots, and the assembly area where both engines and electric motors are installed. In the battery shop, individual cells purchased primarily from Samsung and LG are tested and assembled into packs for the e34, and soon for the VF8 and VF9. Motors are built in-house. The goal is to deliver two new models by the end of 2022 and to produce nearly 100,000 cars a year by 2026—big numbers, but big growth is not new to VinFast. The factory site was coastal swampland in 2017 and the yet plant was up and running in 21 months—too fast for Google maps to keep up. If you look it up, Google shows the entire VinFast campus as being in the ocean. We can report it’s on dry land.