VinFast’s bid to break into the American market has struggled to gain traction. The Vietnamese automaker’s US adventure has been marked by sluggish sales, dwindling dealership support, and a strategy that appears to be unraveling faster than it came together.

As more partners step back from the brand, questions are beginning to surface about the future of VinFast’s presence in the States.

Read: Owners Sue VinFast After VF 8 Takes Almost 24 Hours To Charge

VinFast currently offers the VF 8 crossover and the three-row VF 9 locally, and at one point, it floated plans to bring a compact VF 3 and even a pickup truck to American buyers. Those ambitions now seem increasingly out of reach.

Stalled Expansion Plans

Adding to that, the company ceremoniously broke ground on a North Carolina factory in 2023, aiming to begin production just a year later. That timeline quickly fell apart. Construction was halted, and the plant’s opening has now been postponed until 2028.

The signs aren’t encouraging. According to a report from AutoNews, VinFast now has fewer than two dozen stores operating across the US. That figure continues to shrink, as one location shut down in July, another closed in November, and a third in North Carolina is scheduled to close before the year ends.

Even among the remaining dealers, many are operating in name only. Several locations have no vehicles on site, and some are down to just a handful of units.

Indeed, of the 22 active dealers that VinFast says it has, just 17 of them have EVs in stock. Most of them have 15 or fewer vehicles available. In the case of one dealer in Florida, it has just a single 2024 VF 8 in stock, priced at $52,910.

Sales Collapse

VinFast sales have taken a big hit this year. Through the first ten months of this year, just 1,413 of its vehicles were registered in the United States, representing a 57 percent decline from the year prior. This comes despite the fact that total EV sales across the US have jump 11 percent this year.

The company’s expansion has clearly not gone as it would have liked. It originally expected to quickly sign 125 dealers, and then planned to have hundreds of outlets across the country by the end of 2024. As of August, it claimed to have “nearly 30 authorized dealerships.”

According to VinFast chairwoman Thuy Thu Le, the company has paused its aggressive push into the US and won’t open any more dealerships for the time being.

“Given the tariff situation and the instability in the EV market, we just need to see how that settles before we kind of push hard in the U.S.,” Thuy told Autonews. “Until we see some growth and stability in the U.S. market, we don’t intend to open more dealerships. Instead, we cultivate the relationship with the existing dealers and make sure they can get to profitability faster.”

VinFast is in the spotlight again, this time for reasons it would rather avoid. The Vietnamese automaker now faces another lawsuit, adding a fresh speed bump to its already bumpy road. Owners in the United States claim that the VF 8 Plus AWD charges so slowly it can take a full 24 hours to replenish its battery.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the lawsuit represents customers who leased or purchased a VF 8 Plus AWD in the past four years.

Why So Slow?

The electric vehicles are supposed to charge at a rate of 6.6 kW or higher. Instead, these customers say that their VinFasts charge at under 2 kW. That’s closer to the speed of an original Nissan Leaf than it is to a modern EV.

More: Vinfast Owner Says Their EV Took Over Steering And Nearly Hit A Wall

The plaintiffs, Gil Swigi and Joseph Mizrahi, say that they were led to believe that they were getting standard Level 2 charging performance. VinFast allegedly advertised that its cars could charge at up to 32 amps.

When Mizrahi and Swigi tried that, they claimed the cars would shut down due to software defects. Their only recourse was to charge at 19 amps, which cut total charging speed by almost 40 percent.

To make matters worse, the shutdowns would allegedly happen in the middle of the night with regularity, meaning that owners would wake up to a nasty surprise.

Not only did their car have a problem, but that meant less range to do whatever they had planned for that day. According to Carcomplaints, VinFast attempted multiple repairs on both vehicles in question.

Only when the owners bought additional charging equipment did their cars start to charge at the claimed manufacturer speeds. That said, VinFast successfully argued that both owners agreed to arbitrate their differences. A judge granted that motion, and arbitration is set for February 20, 2026.

Source: Classaction, CarComplaints