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Raymond Tribdino has done a great job for us covering VinFast for us — its grand ambitions, it struggles, and how it is adapting to try to eventually achieve its vision. One of the company’s biggest challenges and failures has been trying to break into the US market. There are various reasons for that, but I have to emphasize that the company needs to seriously revamp how it’s doing marketing in the United States.
I will say that I love it when I see a VinFast on the road. It’s once in a blue moon, but I will yell to everyone in the car — “It’s a VinFast!” This actually happened a week or two ago. I love seeing any pure EV company or auto company with huge EV ambitions succeed.
But I almost never see marketing for VinFast vehicles, and when I do … I’m not impressed. In particular, the company regularly publishes “press release” on major PR newswires. These PR newswires charge a fortune. CleanTechnica would be set financially if just a tiny fraction of those companies came to us instead (and I do believe they’d get much better real reach). But, anyway, this is what a ton of corporations do and VinFast has followed suit. Aside from just getting lost in the shuffle, though, what VinFast publishes is not a fit at all for those platforms and not very well done. They try to write articles (rather than press releases) about why people should go electric and why VinFast vehicles are a good choice. But the articles are bland (and, again, quite out of place on a newswire service) and I would assume convince almost no one to buy a VinFast EV.
