Electric
Vietnam’s biggest car manufacturer drops petrol, keeps Pininfarina. Good enough
We’ve been wrong before, but you probably haven’t heard a great deal about Vinfast so far. Y’know, apart from the fact it tasked Pininfarina with its designs and David Beckham with… oh, something important.
But, as if to answer the question we know was just eating you from the inside, we have two new EV SUVs from Vietnam’s biggest car manufacturer, coming to the Paris Motor Show.
If we start with the VF 8 – which is, logically enough, the smaller one – we find a five-door and five-seat SUV with styling that wouldn’t look out of place coming from one of the legacy manufacturers. We get shades of Renault about the whole thing – which is only slightly odd, considering the design’s from Italian maestros Pininfarina – but you’d be hard-pressed to say it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a car in that segment. And when you remember what the first eastern European, Korean and Chinese cars looked like, it’s clear Vietnam wants to start quite a ways further along.
In terms of spec, it also seems to be landing right in the middle of the current crop – about 400bhp and 450lb ft from a dual-motor, AWD setup, with nought to 60mph apparently arriving somewhere in the low fives. Show some decorum with your right foot and you can apparently eke around 250 miles out of a full charge; real-life has a way of tamping down numbers like that, much like official mpg figures.
The VF 9’s numbers, on the other hand, are a serious case of bloat – six or seven seats, 350 miles of range and acceleration figures dropping back to the low sixes. Of course that’s still absolutely quick enough – motion sickness doesn’t magically become more fun when five children have it instead of two – and it’s also a sign of a pretty canny move from Vinfast.
Much like its design and specs are industry-standard, Vinfast is also sharing parts and drivetrains across its range. So the VF 9 uses the same 400bhp dual-motor setup as the VF 8, because that really is more than enough for a family SUV. Or indeed any car, but that’s rather beside the point at the moment.
And the whole ‘That’s plenty fast enough, thanks’ is something of a theme for Vinfast: back at the start of 2022 – after barely five years in the business and less than three actually selling cars – it announced that it was already done with internal combustion. Clearly, Vinfast is channelling the ‘move fast’ mantra that powers silicon valley. But as for the ‘and break things’ part of the axiom, it looks more like a ‘and don’t be afraid to ditch what you don’t like’. Which seems to bode rather well, in a you’re-looking-at-the-next-Hyundai kind of way. But then again, we’ve been wrong before.
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Keyword: These Pininfarina-designed Vinfast EVs are coming to the Paris Motor Show