You should not buy a VinFast VF8. Let’s just get that thought out of our heads, no matter how good the lease deal looks. My goal is for our reviews to be as honest as they’d be if I was speaking privately to a friend, and that’s what I’d say. The VF8 is a bad deal at any price, and absurd at its starting price of $46,000. But it’d still be a mistake to count VinFast out just yet.
Success in this business comes from adapting quickly, and VinFast seems capable of that. The downside of the company’s fast-moving attitude is that it can lead to unfinished, unrefined, uncompetitive products like the VF8. Its unkind approach to dissent may also prove fatal, if the company doesn’t learn from these mistakes. If it does learn, however, VinFast could still carve out a real niche in the U.S. market.
Gallery: 2024 Vinfast VF 8 Plus Review
(Full Disclosure: VinFast loaned me a VF8 for this review. I received it fully charged and returned it slightly less than fully charged.)
The Good News
I’m lucky to be reviewing cars during an era where bad ones are few and far between. I’d count the VF8 among that lot, but in nearly two years on sale, it’s gone from “unacceptable” to “merely undesirable.” My first stint in a VF8 was in a “City Edition” back at the launch in spring 2022, a vehicle that had a smaller, worse battery and felt completely unfinished. My tester veered heavily to the right on straight highways, had a crashy ride, made me carsick and suffered from software bugs. I called it "unacceptable" in my first drive for Road & Track.
VinFast VF8 Specs
The model I drove this year was an order of magnitude better. I drove a VF8 Plus, the top-end model. It offers 235 miles of range, 402 horsepower, dual-motor all-wheel drive and an 87.7-kilowatt-hour battery, all for around $52,000. Straight away you may see a problem there: 235 miles on that large of a battery means that the VinFast VF8 is averaging 2.6 miles per kWh. That’s quite poor given that the EPA figure tends to be more optimistic than real-world ranges. But at least the thing will charge from 10-80% in around 31 minutes, VinFast claims.
All of those specs are fine enough, and better than the City Edition I last drove. The 2024 VF8 also showed progress in build quality, ride comfort, software design, software stability and driver assistance system tuning. Altogether I saw more progress on more fronts than I usually see from a legacy manufacturer in the two years after a model launch; Most save all of the good stuff for the mid-cycle refresh.
Most also don’t release products as unfinished as the original VF8. Still, the focus on continuous improvement rather than batched changes has worked well for Tesla and many Chinese automakers, allowing them to outmaneuver and out-innovate legacy competition. VinFast is following this path, and being agile in this era is a huge benefit. But only if you can still make a high-quality product people want.
The Bad News
That part has proven to be a more enduring challenge for VinFast. Despite two years of noticeable improvements, the vehicle’s in-car software remains cartoonish, clunky, unreliable and glitchy. It froze on me multiple times, forcing me to reset the system. The salesperson at the dealership showed me how to do that—clearly knowing I’d need it—and in attempting to show the car’s multi-touch capability, caused the touch screen to glitch and become unresponsive.
Once you get the hang of it, and assuming you dodge the glitches, it works ok. But there are always warning triangles, error codes and unregistered touches to breach the tranquility. I saw error codes for the blind spot system, driver assistance system, lights, proximity key, wireless charger and more over just three days with the vehicle. I even got a “window anti-pinch fault,” an error I’ve never even heard of in any other car. The most frequent annoyance was the inconsistent push-button shifter, which often failed to register my presses.
The Sony “Ridevu” video streaming app—which VinFast touted as a big win for in-car entertainment—also never worked, black-screening constantly. The car also had mobile games on it, but they didn’t work consistently, or well, either. Frankly, I’m not sure how VinFast can fix this software without a clean-sheet reset. At the very least, the car needs to do more work to filter out false alarms before triggering an error message.
Things are better when you focus on the vehicle itself, but not by much. The car pitches and heaves far less than the original City Edition did, yet its ride and driving experience are still worst-in-class. It is not as stiff as a Tesla Model Y, making it ok on smooth tarmac. Any time I hit a divot or bump, though, that illusion was shattered. The car’s suspension is unprepared for its task, crashing over minor bumps and ramming its bump stops on anything bigger. Most sickening are the secondary vibrations—after hitting a bump, it tends to bounce back through the suspension at least once, giving the car a pogo-like effect on imperfect pavement.
Forget body control in corners, too, as the VF8 flops over in any slightly sharp bend, overtaxing its inside wheels and rolling more than most EVs. The lane-keeping and driver assistance programs are also among the worst in the business. The tech itself is fine—the car detects other objects reasonably well—but it’s unpredictable when confused, and it makes the steering artificially heavy and weird, making it hard to override. It’s prompted an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Plus, poorly translated warnings like “Pay Attention On Driving” give me little confidence that anyone cared to round out the finer details. The backup camera also lags significantly, and the likelihood that the car recognizes its proximity key on any given approach is about one in three.
At least the car feels relatively well-made. It’s no Lexus, but I didn’t spot any glaring quality issues. My tester didn’t squeak or rattle, and everything I touched felt ok. This isn’t an interior that would impress many, and I didn’t like the seats. But it’s fine.
So that’s what you get for $52,000. A car with poor range, worst-in-class driving dynamics, unreliable software, a decent enough interior and an overall feeling that no one noticed or cared about the small stuff.
It’s not a winning argument, even if you can score a crazy-low lease deal (Like in September, when VF8 Ecos were leasing for $199 a month with $0 down.)
Finally, there’s good reason to root against VinFast. More competition in the EV market is generally good, but in its short time on our radar VinFast has lost any sheen as a force for good. People who brazenly criticize it in Vietnam often find themselves interrogated by the police, as our own Kevin Williams reported.
The company has also reportedly stifled criticism outside of its home country. When a test engineer consulting for VinFast noted that the VF8’s suspension design was inadequate and potentially unsafe, the company launched the car anyway, the engineer told the BBC. He blew the whistle on Reddit, and ended up fired. It's a bad look for the company.
Why I’m Not Counting VinFast Out
Given that the product is bad and the company is an upstart with an already-spotty track record, you’d be forgiven for thinking fate has made its call here. History suggests you temper that expectation. Most foreign brands initially struggled when they came to the U.S., underestimating how skeptical Americans are of foreign brands and how demanding they are of their cars. Our warranty claim rates and cranky customers still annoy German home offices to this day.
Toyota was considered inferior when it arrived. Same with Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Genesis and others. Being the first automaker from your home country to break into this market makes the challenge twice as hard. The average American knows little about Vietnam, and many will discount Vietnamese cars based on vague biases they don’t even understand. VinFast has to overcome this, and it’s a tough task, made tougher by a first product that has completely missed its mark.
Yet the important part isn’t where you begin. In the EV era, as everyone is learning hard lessons, two things matter most: How quickly you learn and how effectively you scale those learnings. VinFast has proven it’s a fast learner; its product has improved considerably, and it’s discounted the VF8 so much that it’s winning customers on value.
Yet it has so many lessons it still needs to scale. VinFast needs to learn how to build Grade-A software, deploy over-the-air updates, tune suspensions, tune ADAS systems, bug test and polish its products. A lot of that is stuff that so-called “traditional” automakers are struggling with. Heck, the Lucid Air is one of the best EVs on the market, and it’s still fixing some of those things. So I can’t overstate how much VinFast has to overcome here.
But that doesn't mean a turnaround is impossible. To survive here, VinFast needs to be more open to feedback, both internally and externally. It must be far more serious about quality and unwilling to release unfinished products. It needs to grow quickly, not just move quickly. Because one thing was clear after driving the VF8: If there is a path to success for this company, VinFast certainly hasn’t found it yet.
Contact the author: Mack.hogan@insideevs.com.
