Google AI
The Times Australia

Times Media Advertising

VinFast Makes 2025 Vietnam’s Car Moment, From Hai Phong to the Middle East

VinFast’s breakout year, capped by its 200,000th vehicle and growing presence from India to the Middle East, shows how Vietnam is rewriting its industrial reputation, with electric cars leading the charge.

HAI PHONG, VIETNAM - Media OutReach Newswire - 8 January 2026 - On the final day of 2025, VinFast's Hai Phong manufacturing complex ended the year at full throttle, rolling off the 200,000th vehicle from its production line. For Vietnam's first and only global carmaker, the number capped off a year of achievements that highlighted Vietnam's growing capability as a manufacturing hub.

VinFast
VinFast's Hai Phong manufacturing complex ended the year at full throttle, rolling off the 200,000th vehicle from its production line.

For more than a year, VinFast has led Vietnam's car market, outselling brands that once defined what success on four wheels looked like, a welcome change in a country long used to importing its automotive identity. VinFast vehicles are now part of daily traffic as commuter cars, family haulers, and long-distance companions, judged and praised with the same standards buyers apply to Japanese, Korean, or German imports.

Scale, however, tells only part of the story. In the same year, VinFast revealed a far more technical project: the Lac Hong 900 LX, an armored electric vehicle certified to meet the VPAM VR7 ballistic protection standard. Very few automakers globally can build vehicles at that level of protection, and even fewer can do so with a fully electric platform.

Outside Vietnam, over the past two years, VinFast has pushed into North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Notably, in 2025, three new plants came online, one in Vietnam and two more in India and Indonesia. The Indian factory in Tamil Nadu entered a market famous for thin margins and even thinner patience. It is not a place that waits politely for newcomers to find their footing. Yet by December, just months after starting sales, VinFast had risen to become India's fourth largest EV brand, prompting one Indian outlet to note that its market entry "proved to be a huge success."

Much of VinFast's momentum, across every market it has entered, comes from how it thinks about ownership. Rather than treating sales as an endpoint, the company tends to enter markets with an entire support system designed to remove local anxieties. In regions where electric vehicles still prompt practical questions, those details carry weight.

VinFast VF 8 model in UAE.
VinFast VF 8 model in UAE.

The Middle East offers a clear case. There, the VF 8 is positioned as a premium midsize electric SUV, supported by policies designed to reduce hesitation. Buyers receive a ten-year or 200,000-kilometer vehicle warranty, a ten-year unlimited-mileage battery warranty, and five years of free servicing, along with mobile service units, round-the-clock roadside assistance, and guaranteed parts availability.

For many buyers in the Middle East, Vietnam was not previously associated with car manufacturing, an image VinFast is steadily undoing for a country long thought of mainly as an exporter of rice and shoes. Beyond the vehicles themselves, that kind of normalization may be VinFast's most lasting export.

There was a time when cars from South Korea were treated as a punchline in Western markets, but those jokes have not aged well. Vietnam's turn is arriving in a different moment, shaped by electrification and fewer fixed ideas about who belongs in the global auto club. And this time, nobody is laughing.


Hashtag: #VF8 #VinFast


The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Times Magazine

VoltX Energy expands into Victoria & ACT to meet surging home battery demand

Leading Australian energy solutions provider VoltX Energy and premier sponsor of the NRL Manly Wa...

Victorian Drivers To Receive 20% Rego Rebate From June 1 In Major Cost-Of-Living Measure

Victorian motorists will begin receiving significant registration savings from June 1 as the Allan...

How Australian Businesses Are Using AI To Cut Costs And Improve Efficiency

Artificial intelligence was once viewed by many small business owners as something futuristic, exp...

Quickest Way of Getting Rid of Your Old Cars in Brisbane?

If you are done searching for a practical solution for quickly getting rid of your old car, this w...

The Human Supplement Craze Has Officially Gone to the Dogs (Literally)

Australians’ appetite for supplements is no longer limited to their own vitamin cabinets. New reta...

AI Guilt: It’s Real — But it is irrational

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful tools ever made available to ...

Australians Are Keeping Their Cars Longer — And It’s Changing The Market

Australia’s car market is undergoing a subtle but important transformation. People are keeping th...

Streaming Fatigue: Australians Overwhelmed By Subscriptions

Streaming was once supposed to simplify entertainment. Instead, many Australians now feel overwhe...

Why Shopping Centres No Longer Feel Exciting

There was a time when going to the shopping centre felt like an event. Families spent entire Satu...

The Times Features

Most Australians think the Budget Just Changed the Rule…

A generation of Australians may be entering the biggest rethink of wealth creation since the rise ...

Remember All-You-Can-Eat Restaurants? Australia Still M…

For many Australians, few dining experiences created more excitement than the words: “All you can ...

Australia’s Changing Family Dynamic: When Adult Childre…

Australia’s housing affordability crisis is no longer simply an economic issue. It is reshaping t...

ASX Movements Since Labor’s Budget: What Investors Are …

Australia’s share market has spent recent weeks digesting the implications of Labor’s federal budg...

QLD Day

On Saturday 6 June, parkrun events across the state will be a sea of maroon, with communities  str...

NAGNATA: ‘FUTURE = FIBRE’ — Movement 21 at AFW 2026 …

Photography by Cesar OcampoOn Day 3 of Australian Fashion Week 2026, the energy at the runway shifte...

Flu Season in Australia: Why Health Authorities Are Tak…

As winter settles across Australia, so too does the annual flu season — a recurring health challen...

Smart Supermarket Shopping: The Money-Saving Hacks Aust…

Australians are becoming smarter supermarket shoppers. Rising grocery prices, higher mortgage rep...

Kmart’s Homewares Revolution: How a Discount Retailer B…

There was a time when many Australians viewed Kmart as the place to buy low-cost basics, school su...