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The Vietnamese should never be underestimated. The French and American forces also took them lightly. I remember laughing at the Japanese cars in the 1970s. You know how that turned out.
I will be absolutely stunned if Vinfast survives into the 2030s (at least in the US). Tesla was an extreme anomaly that benefited from being in the right place at the exact right time with an enigmatic leader. Now that the legacy automakers are beginning to roll out EVs, the window of opportunity for electric startups has all but slammed shut. It will likely take an industry-altering breakthrough in battery range or vehicle cost for a newcomer to survive at this point, and it is extremely unlikely that any other recent EV startups are still around in 2030 aside from Lucid and Rivian, and even those aren't sure bets at this point. Obviously I'm not rooting for Vinfast to fail but I've followed cars for basically my whole life and there's a reason why we hardly ever see brand new automakers; it's next to impossible to break into a literally multi-trillion dollar industry without existing name recognition. Especially in today's market where buyers demand so much from their cars, and put far too much emphasis on the status and image that their cars project.
Hyundai/Kia made their entry into the US back when buyers weren't so demanding, and could still carve out a niche as being the discount player against relatively more established competition from the likes of Honda, Toyota, and similar. Many entry-level cars back in the 80s/early 90s didn't come standard with air conditioning or even power steering, two features that are essentially required equipment in all cars today regardless of price point, which opened the door just enough for the Koreans to squeeze through. The automotive landscape is so different now that new automakers (especially electric ones) either have to be the first to market with something, offer substantially greater range than anyone else, or offer a substantially lower price. Vinfast offers literally none of that, plus comes from a country with basically no well-known international conglomerates, AND has a terrible name (sounds like a scammy Carfax ripoff). Vinfast's business plan has seemingly changed abruptly several times in only a few years of operation, and much of what I have read suggests that there is an incredible amount of respect in Vietnam granted to anyone who can sell a product in America, which is resulting in Vinfast's goal being more or less that they want to sell a car in America compared to actually producing a good car that can be sold in America at some point in the future. A number of much more successful Chinese automakers have been trying to break into the American market for about two decades now with literally no success whatsoever aside from buying Volvo and Lotus.
It took them 4 days to buy the car because Leith halted delivering any cars due to an issue with their computers that program the car's computers prior to delivery. When they gave Leith an ultimatum that either they were getting a car that final day (he had a flight to catch), Leith finally agreed that if they drove the car for 10 miles and it didn't blow up, they could have it.
They got their car, and on the way to a charging station, the infotainment system completely froze up. And it took multiple calls to figure out how to reset the whole thing and get it working again. While it was frozen up, the car couldn't even be locked.
That's about as far as they've gotten with it.
Oh, and the zero down turned into about $6,000 with fees and other stuff. Apparently a lot of it had to do with registering the car in Colorado and he thinks it wasn't done right and is expecting to get money back once they straighten things out with Colorado. Good luck to him.
No building at the site yet as of last week. Still doing grading. They are suppose to be building cars by when??
2025 in theory... though Vinfast seems to be redirecting some of their energy back to Southeast Asia and their new plant in Indonesia. I suspect they won't announce any delays to the US plant until they have completed their next round of raising capital and cash to maintain ongoing operations in 2024, including the $1 billion stock pump and dump agreement with Yorkville Advisors. We should have a better need of their capital needs when they report Q4 results. At the end of Q3 they had burned through $1.8 billion to reach a cash position of only $158 million. How much more they burned through in Q4 will be informative for their ability to build a $4 billion factory in NC (which ultimately requires cash or even more debt).
No building at the site yet as of last week. Still doing grading. They are suppose to be building cars by when??
I guess maybe their name should be changed to Vinslow...!
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