If you're a powerful international conglomerate that wants to sell cars in the U.S., the easiest approach is to buy a company that already does that. Think Tata with Jaguar and Land Rover, Geely with Volvo, or whoever controls Lotus these days. It's much more difficult, and smacks of a certain hubris, to forgo all incumbent brand awareness and institutional knowledge and just start building cars. But if any country loves blithe confidence, it's America, so let's give a warm welcome to the VinFast VF8, the latest answer to the question, "How hard can it be to build a car?"
VinFast which at least 30 percent of the U.S. population will initially hear as "SlimFast" is part of Vingroup Joint Stock Company, otherwise known simply as Vingroup, a sprawling Vietnamese company with interests in hospitality, real estate, education, and plenty more. If you want to know what a given Vingroup company does, the name is usually a clue: Vinhomes, VinUniversity, VinBigData (we shudder to ask what VinBrain does but can probably guess). The VF8, the first model to make it to the U.S., is a two-row, all-wheel-drive crossover-junior to the three-row VF9 but larger than the VF7. If that naming convention sounds so painfully obvious that it doesn't bear explaining, somebody please tell Infiniti to crib some notes.
This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Car and Driver.
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This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Car and Driver.
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