VinFast faces an uphill battle. The Vietnamese company, a subsidiary of the country’s largest private employer VinGroup, is attempting to launch an all-electric car brand in America in a crowded market. Legacy automakers, no-name newcomers, and market leaders like Tesla are all trying to sell Americans on electric crossovers. As an utter unknown from an obscure brand, VinFast’s VF8 has to be great to have any hope of poaching buyers.
It isn’t great. It isn’t even good.
The paint quality, interior design, switchgear, and Pininfarina exterior styling meet industry standards, and the car worked during our 90-minute drive without mechanical failure. But in the context of the American EV market, where the $56,000 VinFast VF8 City Edition Plus I drove is up against mature, excellent products, the whole endeavor seems hopeless.
The problem isn’t as apparent on paper. The VF8 City Edition is an all-electric five-seat crossover, bigger than a Volkswagen ID.4, offering 207 miles of range in “Eco” trim or 191 in the upscale “Plus” variant. That’s below average for the class, but the City Edition is also the temporary early-adopter offering. The cars en route from Vietnam are standard editions. They’ll have not-yet-certified EPA ranges of 264 and 243 miles for the Eco and Plus, respectively. That VinFast chose to equip the first batch with a less-dense battery from Samsung when its long-term and volume battery supplier is CATL is just one of many questionable decisions in the VF8’s gestation.
Still, the all-wheel-drive-only VF8 City Edition produces an adequate 349 hp in the Eco guise and 402 hp in the spendier Plus model. In the Plus model I sampled, there was plenty of power for daily driving, enabling a 0-60 time of 5.5 seconds. None of these specs are astounding, but all of them put the VF8 in line with the competition.
Where it falls behind is in the execution. You don’t notice it until you get inside, as the attractive bodywork and high-quality paint are two of the only execution highlights. As soon as I sat in the overstuffed, unsupportive seats, though, I noticed flaws. The entire door card flexes when you pull the handle shut. The panel gaps are large and inconsistent. The icons on the center screen are visibly pixelated and respond inconsistently. Buttons are made of nice materials but feel mushy.
Whatever. These are nuances that even established carmakers get wrong. The unforgivable stuff happens when you’re in motion.
The VinFast VF8 has the worst body control of any modern car I’ve ever driven. Over a 90-minute drive, the 5600-lb SUV never stopped bobbing, swaying, and bucking, producing near-constant head-tossing motions. Riding in the passenger seat, I became car sick for the first time in years. When I switched seats with the driver, he felt queasy, too, even though he says he’s never been the type to get car sick. Despite the firmness you feel over impacts, though, the VF8 is also sloppy and prone to excessive roll in corners. It is unclear if this is the result of poor tuning or fundamental issues with the vehicle’s suspension geometry (control blades at the rear, “smart axles” at the front), but the ride quality alone is enough to disqualify the VF8 from serious consideration.
Steering, too, is the worst I’ve experienced on a production car. There is zero feel. Not zero feel in the hyperbolic way some people use to describe modern BMWs or boring CUVs, zero feel as in no relation between what I felt happening as I turned the wheel and what the wheels were actually doing. The turn in was relatively lazy and then somewhere in the ratio it gets sharper, but with no complementary change in force required. Mid-way through a corner, the nose would suddenly tuck in and upset the balance of the car, which was already listing over in unpredictable ways. Anything more than a dawdling pace felt sketchy.
Not that I wanted to rush, anyway, as the VF8 did not inspire confidence under braking. On any slight downward slope, the car bucked and heaved under braking, squirming underfoot. Hard acceleration was equally uninviting due to the suspension’s inability to cope with serious forces.
Even cruising at a steady speed on flat ground, the VF8 had issues. The vehicle we drove had just under 900 miles on the odometer and had been prepped by VinFast corporate for the event. Yet it was clearly out of alignment. It pulled hard to the right on the highway. At least the lane keeping aids and adaptive cruise control worked.
When the car’s hardware wasn’t annoying or scaring me, its software was. Talking about the car prompted its “Hey Vinfast” smart assistant to pop up, but attempting to use it was a fool’s errand. It would occasionally correctly interpret the words of a command, displaying what we said on the screen, but still fail to execute the valid command. That was far from the biggest issue, though. The car beeped and flashed warnings and buzzers constantly. Disabling the various warnings required a deep exploration into the infotainment system’s confounding menu structure. Each setting required two more taps than I expected, and never lived under the sub-menu you’d first check. I should have taken notes, because turning off the car reset all of the driver aid settings.
Other journalists at the event reported various malfunctions and issues, though none were consistent among all of the assembled VF8s. One group reported no major issues and no other journalists had the alignment problem, so my experience may not be entirely representative. Everyone, however, agreed on a few things: The software and constant beeping was annoying; the quality and details were questionable; and the ride was abysmal.
I could continue, but I trust you understand that the VF8 has a litany of issues that would prevent me from ever recommending it. Perhaps more importantly, the company could not seem to articulate a compelling reason why anyone should choose one over the competition. VinFast Innovation and Concepts Lead Jonathan Chen said that the pitch for the VF8 is that it offers good storage room, “best-in-class” aesthetics, and smart service features that are better than the market. Pressed on what sort of digital experience VinFast customers get that’s better than the competition, he said the car has standard CarPlay, Android Auto, and on-board TuneIn and iHeartRadio functionality. Sure, great.
The company also has a digital video partner that it’s “excited to announce” soon. Let’s hope it’s more impressive than Tesla’s video partner, Netflix.
The CEO of VinFast USA, Van Anh Nguyen, had a different pitch. She said the brand’s appeal is in selling beautifully crafted and built spacious SUVs, using inclusive pricing and sales policies, and “quality products, that’s for sure.”
While the VF8 City Edition Eco is available for $414 a month with $5729 at signing, and undeniably spacious, quality is a big unknown for the entire brand. As we spoke, Nguyen sat 15 feet from a VF9 prototype, which was propped up by jack stands in the rear after the air suspension deflated. One executive told me that it had deflated in transit, and that it wouldn’t happen in a customer driveway. When I asked if it’d re-inflate if they turned it on, he said yes, but said there was no charger next to it and they didn’t want to deplete the battery. I’m not sure who he expected to believe that. Later on, I mentioned the clearly malfunctioning air suspension to the company’s director of communications, and he offered a different explanation: “It’s a prototype.”
That’s what the company said when journalists drove pre-production VF8s in Vietnam. The assumption is that it’ll be fixed by the time the car launches, but our experience with explicitly production-spec VF8s didn’t inspire confidence. The company is so focused on getting to market that it doesn’t appear to be worried about getting everything right. At least VinFast is offering an impressive 10-year, 125,000-mile comprehensive warranty, so that teething issues will be worked out on the company dime. That gives the company some room to take risks, to be bold. According to Nguyen, moving fast is in the company’s DNA. She beamed with pride when she noted that work on the VF8 started “three or four” years ago. Even for carbuilders with decades of experience, it is exceedingly rare to develop and launch an all-new platform for a new market in under 5 years.
“However, I like to emphasize that working with urgency doesn’t mean that we are taking shortcuts,” she told Road & Track. “We are not cutting corners in anything. In manufacturing, or in engineering, we still have to take all of the steps that the company needed.”
I can’t say I agree. Also on the company agenda: Launching Canada next week, launching the standard edition VF8 this year, launching the VF9 this year, and then launching the VF6 and VF7 within the following year. It’s a cadence few automakers in the world could pull off.
The ambition is commendable. Going into the drive, I wanted to give the company the benefit of the doubt. The small-market conglomerate turned international automotive power player is a story we’ve heard before, from both Hyundai and Kia. Like the early export cars from those brands, though, the VF8 is starting things off on rough footing. The car is simply unfinished, wholly uncompetitive, and in all honesty among the worst modern cars I have ever driven. Getting it into production and over the many regulatory hurdles for the U.S. market was an undeniable feat. But the real work lies ahead. If VinFast wants enough market share to justify its sizable investment in its upcoming U.S. manufacturing facility, it’ll have to do a lot better than this.
Arguably the most fickle member of the Road & Track staff, Reviews Editor Mack Hogan is likely the only person to ever cross shop an ND Miata with an Isuzu Vehicross. He founded the automotive reviews section of CNBC during his sophomore year of college and has been writing about cars ever since.
