Vietnamese automaker VinFast’s entry into the U.S. market a few years back wasn’t exactly butterflies and roses. Its first vehicle to be offered Stateside, the all-electric VF8 crossover, was hit with a handful of less-than-stellar reviews, including from our own Emme Hall, who was dealt with a handful of software and hardware issues during her first drive of the car back in 2023.
Later that year, VinFast announced it would start paying buyers every time their cars broke down (up to $300 if the car was left inoperable). Fast-forward to 2025, with a slowdown of EV demand and tariffs in the U.S., and the company has delayed its North Carolina plant and pivoted back towards developing cars for Asia.
Despite this pivot, VinFast still maintains a presence here in the United States, with 17 dealerships nationwide (it used to be more than that, but the company closed a handful of them at the end of last year). According to Automotive News, VinFast sold under 1,500 vehicles through the first 11 months of 2025.
As if things weren’t bleak enough, VinFast is facing a new issue: Cars that will do absolutely anything—including move objects and accelerate aggressively enough to do a burnout—just to maintain a “creep” speed of 4 mph.
What Is Creep Mode?
If you’ve ever driven a gas-powered car with a traditional torque converter-type automatic transmission, you’ve likely experienced creep. It’s the movement of the car that happens when you take your foot off the brake pedal, but before you use the accelerator. It’s the car “creeping” forward at 3-4 mph as the torque converter transfers torque from the engine to the transmission and then to the wheels.
Because electric cars do not have internal combustion engines or torque-converter transmissions, they don’t “creep” forward when you release the brake pedal. To get an EV to accelerate at all from a stop, you need to press the accelerator pedal. If you go from a gas-powered car to an electric car, it’s one of the biggest adjustments in driving behavior you’ll have to deal with.
In recent years, EV carmakers have added “creep modes” to their EVs in an effort to make their electric cars drive more like gas cars, to give their cars more familiarity for prospective buyers who might be scared away by the difference in driving style required by a normal electric car, or someone who prefers a car that creeps forward on its own in certain situations, such as heavy traffic.
Creep mode in electric cars works as you’d expect; instead of staying still when you let off the brakes, the car will simulate a torque converter automatic and begin applying a light acceleration on its own without any other input from the driver. It can usually be turned on or off through the vehicle’s software, so if it gets annoying, you can just switch it off.
VinFast’s Creep Mode Is Very Determined
The VinFast VF8, being a modern EV, has a creep mode you can enable through the infotainment screen in the center of the dashboard, toggled through a simple emulated on-off switch. When it’s switched on, the car will begin to creep at about 4 mph when the driver releases the brakes. The problem? It seems the car is configured to aim for 4 mph no matter what.
The issue came to my attention through this video published to YouTube by fellow journalist Kyle Conner, which shows how the VF8’s creep mode will attempt to maintain 4 mph even in scenarios where there isn’t enough traction, like on a snowy hill. Instead of realizing it’s lost traction, the VF8 will continue to feed power to the motors until that 4 mph speed is achieved. The result is a seemingly dangerous situation that involves runaway one-wheel burnouts:
This wheelspin occurred even with traction control turned on, suggesting the VF8’s ability to creep forward supercedes any traction safety parameters. Theoretically, the car should never be going over 4 mph in this scenario, and to VinFast’s credit, it doesn’t seem to. But at a few points, it looks like that wheel is spinning at highway speeds. What would happen if that wheel suddenly caught traction while it was spinning that quickly, say on an icy road? It seems pretty scary.
This isn’t even the first time someone’s highlighted the determination of the VF8’s creep mode. Jason Cammisa spoke on the issue on The Carmudgeon Show podcast back in December, and even set up a little experiment showing how the VF8 will deploy as much power as possible to maintain 4 mph, even when pushing a full dumpster’s worth of trash:
In a gas-powered car, creep is determined by the amount of power the engine produces at idle. If, say, you’re pointed up a hill or stuck in deep snow or mud, that idle power might not be enough for the car to move on its own. That logic seemingly hasn’t been applied to the VF8’s creep mode. Instead of measuring creep by power output, it’s seemingly measured by speed alone. And when the car senses it’s not going that predetermined speed, it does everything in its power to accelerate to that speed, even if that means huge acceleration in low-traction scenarios.
Where Is VinFast In This?
Curious to know whether VinFast is aware of this problem, I attempted to reach out to the company’s U.S. operations for a statement. Unfortunately, it looks like most of its web presence has gone dark. VinFast’s American head of communications left the company back in November, according to LinkedIn.
The company has a general contact form on its American customer-facing website, though it too doesn’t seem to be working. No matter what I put into the sheet, I’m hit with a Captcha error (there is no Captcha prompt on the website that I can see).
In place of those, I reached out to VinFast’s general media email, which got bounced back to me, saying the “recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.” I’ve also reached out to the company’s Canadian representative, and to its investor relations email to see if someone can point me in the right direction. Even if VinFast might be giving up on the American market, it still has a responsibility to make sure the cars it sells here are safe.
Top graphic image: Kyle Conner / YouTube
this is gloriously amazing!
I can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with vinfast in the us. It seems like they are just confused and are lerking. You go to Vietnam and they are everywhere and fine especially the vf3 in the smaller cities. But vf8 taxis and personal cars in the bigger cities. They are so popular the Chinese car brands opened new flagship stores and hardly got any traffic. They got some people in there with a bubble gum pink car but sales were basically non-existent. I think part of the issue is their sales and service network. Now they are teaching out of Viet Americans who are in automotive to become dealers or offer service. But not having over the air updates is a big issue for them. It must have to do with the us firmware branch. It has a lot of things taken out and its probably looked at as not important. Especially as they are expanding and making waves in other SEA markets especially why they vf3.
So, it’s potentially dangerous, of course. It’s also HILARIOUS!
Wow.
That’s kind of creepy.
My better half has always referred to this as “impulse power”, but maybe it’s just her.
Well, then that’s an example of Scotty’s full impulse power, Jim!
I was in Vietnam in December and you would have no clue that they’re having qc issues with how many you see on the road. Granted, it seemed like a majority were fleet owned cabs. The exception were the VF3s. Saw quite a few of those in the big cities, often with fun custom wraps or decal themes. Man, I really want one to use for running around town.
Why would we need a creep mode at all? Maybe I’m just used to manuals and bikes but what does it matter?
I use creep mode with my EV since I park in a very tight garage spot. Thankfully, the Dodge doesn’t use all 500hp to climb over the parking stop I set up.
Agree
I wonder how someone figured this out. Aside from the snow situation, it doesn’t seem like there’d be an obvious sign it did this. Unless you crept into the car in front of you, and it just kept pushing all the cars in front of you…
…or protesters, or the gate of a military installation
VinFast should incorporate the Leaf’s hauntingly sinister reversing noises into the VF8’s creep mode for full effect.
I have a 2019 Kia Niro EV and although it is an altogether fine car, it has the stupid creep turned on all the time, with no ability to disable it. Why? Just why?? It also results in some odd behavior, such as if you use the regen paddle to fully brake to a stop, it won’t creep, but otherwise it will unless it is in park or neutral. Except if you turn on auto hold, which doesn’t just remove the creep but I believe also adds the parking brake anytime you are fully stopped.
The creep mode does seem to oppose single-pedal driving mode. I don’t generally mind that an automatic creeps – it does help smooth out starts from a full stop. But I never missed it with a manual. I guess just comes down to control.
I have both a Bolt and a Niro EV. They’re very similar cars build to roughly the same spec. The Kia has adaptive cruise (good). The Bolt has 1 pedal driving (good). I have no idea why both cars don’t have both features.
I have early years of both cars, so it may be resolved on the latest cars.
The adaptive cruise is why I went with the Niro EV over the Bolt. Also because of the heat pump, but in the end the cars with heat pump were too much of an added cost and I settled for one without. I do have a heated steering wheel and ventilated seats which I don’t think are available on the Bolt.
Very nice! My Bolt has a heated steering wheel.
I’ve got a ’22 Niro EV, and previously drove an ’18 Niro Hybrid. The creep is almost identical between the two, in the back of my mind I just assumed they wanted the EV to feel more like the ‘regular’ model.
This vehicle subscribes to Jeremy Clarkson’s formula of “power and speed” to overcome obstacles.
Clarrrksonnnn you muppet
VAG saw the light and partnered with Rivian’s (admittedly excellent) software development team when Volkwagon wasn’t cutting it on their own.
I suspect if VinFast did the same, their product would improve at a dramatic pace.
Wow. So many things wrong with this implementation. If creep mode is trying to do speed control (which it shouldn’t be), then a torque limit based on throttle input should be in place. Normally creep is not targeting a specific speed, just some minimal amount of torque to move the vehicle. Think about creeping up a slight incline, at some point if the incline is too steep, it requires throttle intervention to keep moving. This is generally by design to prevent the dumpster pushing situation. Hopefully they have someone manning the Gov’t relations office, because I suspect NHTSA is going to be calling for answers too (assuming we still have that branch of Gov’t).
As a software person, this just seems like a feature a programmer added in a quick afternoon of coding, without really thinking about or understanding the problem they were trying to solve.
I remember when the only way to get this experience was to boot up Midtown Madness and enter a couple cheat codes.
What a wonderful world we live in today.
Regarding the failed CAPTCHA on the VinFast website, most of us developers are using invisible CAPTCHA these days. Invisible CAPTCHA analyzes user behavior in the background and prompts a challenge only if it suspects the user of being a bot. All that is to say that if the CAPTCHA were failing, for whatever reason–invalid tokens, bad configuration, server error–you might not see anything at all indicating that CAPTCHA was there, but the backend process that receives the form submission would let you know it had failed.
FWIW, I was able to use the form to submit a request to VinFast.
As far as VinFast’s creep mode, it looks like what they’ve done is create a 4-mph cruise control mode. And an aggressive one at that. Even with cruise control, most modern cars will cut power and disengage cruise control if they detect a loss of traction, instead of continuing to increase the amount of power.
I wonder what I was doing to be identified as a robot…
Calculations.
Battling Yoshimi?
“Bot,” not “robot.”
And probably nothing. The invisible CAPTCHA runs in the background for everyone and always sends a response for your backend server to identify, even if the user isn’t deemed a bot. This is to ensure someone or something doesn’t bypass the CAPTCHA requirement entirely. But the user only sees an actual CAPTCHA challenge if the validator is suspicious.
If you didn’t see a CAPTCHA challenge and weren’t asked to identify how many pictures were busses or something banal like that, chances are that either a) the CAPTCHA validator was broken completely, or b) you weren’t deemed a bot and would have been allowed through; it’s just that something upstream wasn’t working.
You and me both, brother.
Equal parts hilarious and horrifying. Software-defined Vehicles are supposedly the next big thing, let’s go!
Only if the gas-powered car was an automatic. If you would change from a manual car to an electric, this is one of the few characteristics you don’t have to get used to. There is plenty else to adjust to however, like the lack of shifting, no usable audio feedback from the engine to know how fast you go, no buttons only touchscreens (almost all EV’s), etcetera, etcetera.
One thing I definately appreciate about driving an EV is the “engine” braking. Modern automatics are a mixed bag, but some just won’t slow when you get off the gas. My previous work vehicle, a Cherokee, would require braking at highway speeds to shed a couple mph – otherwise it would just hold 65 for a mile if there wasn’t an incline.
The engine braking is something that I have to get used to every time I drive an EV. I am very much used to lift and coast, f.i. when I approach stop signs or trafic lights. With EV’s I slow down way too early and too much compared to my own car.
Youtube wants me to sign in to prove I am not a Bot.
Even youtube is stopping people asking for papers now.
Yeah, YT wants me to turn off my VPN all the time. Not happening unless I have an actual need to find a video to address a real world problem in my life.
Every time I try to find things on Youtube now I just end up scrolling through those stupid short videos because I don’t know how to stop them.
For some reason, there is a whole genre of women truckers now? I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s always a woman either in or near a big rig complaining that men don’t notice her.
If you’re on a browser, there are extensions to disable those from appearing. There’s also alternative apps like Youtube Revanced which hide them on Android phones. Not sure if there’s an iOS equivalent.
I have yet to find a worse use of time than endless vertical videos.
I’m not going to bother with the extension. I check in on you tube like once a week and watch F1 videos until I get bored.
YouTube delays playback for me for 5 seconds in attempt to annoy me enough to switch from Firefox (Zen Browser, specifically) to Chrome.
I’ll keep my adblockers and wait 5 seconds, thank you.
This is a hilarious version of the “paperclip apocalypse”, where the VF8 will just sacrifice all other priorities to make sure it’s going 4 mph.
I assume this can be stopped by simply hitting the brakes?
If you hit the brakes the car will determine that you are interfering with the 4mph Directive and will attempt to incinerate you with the heated seats.
I went from a manual gasoline car to an EV, so I didn’t miss the creep. I’m not even sure if my EV does it. If I ever wanted it to creep in traffic situations, I’d just set the sensor cruise control.
How is this an issue? My Volt (admittedly a second gen, but that’s still a 10 year old platform at this point) has creep mode, which works exactly like how it does in a gas car. I do wish I could turn it off though.
Did you… read the article?
Yes, I mean how is this an issue for vinfast. Shit has been figured out for a decade, how are they fucking it up?
Ah, got it. As usual, it’s hard to figure out context by words on a screen of any size.
Absolutely understand the confusion, I didn’t word it the best!
Our Volts will stop creeping when they encounter resistance or slippage, not keep applying more throttle until the wheels are spinning to maintain 4 mph.
I know, thats what I mean haha. Vinfast shouldnt be screwing this up!
Similarly, my Bolt does creep in Drive, you have to shift to ‘L’ to turn off creep (and turn on a whole lot of regen braking). The ‘L’ thing was to save money on switchgear and use a shifter from a Chinese Buick, but it’s intuitive enough. Similarly, creep doesn’t really do much if the vehicle is pointed up a hill, or you turn your wheels into a curb, or basically anything that would stop a gas/diesel slushbox auto. It certainly will not attempt to move mountains to maintain speed. This seemed to have been a solved problem that Vinfast unsolved.
VinFast has demonstrated a profound lack of skill in its cars thus far; however, I’m sure that even it could have programmed in a functional creep program if its developers had understood how that function is used. As it is, it looks like something that was overlooked…or that was dictated to the development team in a limited way and with limited pass/fail definition. And then from there, no one in QA or drive tuning managed to catch it, either.
I live within reasonable driving distance of a VinFast dealership and I planned on test driving a VF8 at some point. Perhaps I should prioritize that as it seems like they’re on the way out of the US. Some crazy lease deals out there but I don’t think I’m interested in one of these at any price.
I wouldn’t be relying on dealer service over the years. Hope Haynes and Chilton have it covered.
Nothing a few software engineers and programmers can’t fix, right?
Hexadecimal is a universal language.
Well, in Europe it turned out that many had to be totaled at the slightest fender bender because no one at VinFast bothered documenting the jig dimensions for body repair, and body shops would get into legal trouble if those were not referenced and followed.
They (VinFast) since shaped up. Pun intended.
Wait, there are VinFast dealerships?
I looked it up and Rivian has 37 service Centers in the US, so less service centers than States. Lucid has 33 Dealerships and about the same number of service only centers.
I figured VinFast would have no network at all, given how much smaller it is than Lucid or Rivian in US market penetration.
Tom Wood (one of the multi make dealer chains here) has a VinFast store in Indianapolis fwiw.
Every time I read about this company I feel like I’m being punked. These products can’t really exist, right?
I kind of got the same feeling when they first showed up in NC wanting to build a factory. I have seen a few Vinfasts on the road, so they do have a working(?) product.
I have to say it – I love these guys more and more every time I read about them.
That they managed to sell any cars at all on the US market, then be still here a few years later is absolutely amazing in my book.
That they integrate a idle drift mode is even more amazing. Kudos to them.
They remind me a little of the dawn of the age of automobiles, when hundreds of “companies” made cars in garages or barns and driving was was done with a constant risk of the machine underneath them blowing up.
(Not sure if that’s 100% accurate, but that’s the impression I get 120 years later.)
Well, to the notable exception that VinFast seem to be able and willing to douse the fires of their own making with flows of cash, which makes them quite unique.
They are like that caricatural sheikh in the Cannonball Run movie, slapping everyone with cash wads.
I saw a Vinfast on the road a few weeks ago and had to snap off a quick salute to the brave person who chose to buy a Vietnamese electric SUV of questionable quality and dubious reliability with non-existent support. Shine on, you crazy diamond!
I’m all for a Creep mode towing a 747 commercial
Wait, hold on, as the kids say, you’re “cooking.” I need to hitch a Vinfast up to a Boeing 747. I wonder if the creep mode can overcome the several tons of ballast that would be needed to get a VF8 to tow a widebody?
Do it, this automotive science experiment absolutely needs to be done for the betterment of society, through entertainment value.
I mean, if a Touareg can do it.
Bait cast. Now we wait…
This is 100% the sort of thing that the Autopian was made for – that car will try so hard before it combusts!