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
They are Just like Kia/Hyundai back in the day. Once Vinfast (Love the name BTW) gets their shit together, they will be a force to be reckoned with and a viable player in the car market. Buy their stock and wait and see…………………..
I’m late to this party but I absolutely love that someone basically hard-coded a low-level speed control loop as creep mode so NO MATTER THE TORQUE NEEDED, THIS CAR WILL MOVE AT 4MPH DAMMIT….. and it made it through whatever form of QC and validation they had.
Theoretically, even misusing the existing cruise control code shouldn’t be this dumb… unless the cruise control will also do an autonomous one tire fire. Are they fetching vehicle speed from only one sensor instead of fusing multiple sensors/readings!?
So, what happens if VinFast or any car company calls it quits and packs up to leave?
Obviously any owners are SOL but what if there’s an important safety recall that could affect other motorists on the road? Who is writing new software? Who is replacing faulty mechanisms and modules?
There’s already a precedent for that: Fisker. That means owners will be SOL
One of my few complaints with my first-gen Kia Niro PHEV is the janky creep mode, especially when running as a hybrid. It’s a dual-clutch auto, so I get that people see “automatic” and expect creep, but the inherent issues dual-clutch transmissions have with low speeds are further exacerbated by it also trying to juggle EV and engine power at the same time, and it really can’t cope. I wish it would just chill and wait for me to tell it when to go.
Fortunately it’s a lot better in pure EV mode which is what I mostly use.
Reminds me of a little test I did with my 80s Audi back in the 90s. I was curious about what would happen if you pressed the brake and the gas at the same time at low speeds. Mine was a manual transmission, but the results were interesting to say the least. The car would not let the engine stall. It provided enough power that I had to stand on the brake pedal to get it to slow significantly, and I could not get the car to stop/stall until I took my foot off the gas. It was like a relentless force. The engine didn’t rev up, but it wouldn’t drop below a certain RPM, either.
Cool wheel covers! With 4 lugs instead of 5 they would fit a Tesla just fine 😀
18 months in, cant wait to get rid of these 2 vf8’s… The company is crap – They abandoned the US market – More than half their dealerships have closed – What a joke!
Tell us more – how did you end up with two VF8s?
Omg this is epic. Not a lot of snow in the Vietnam proving grounds?
But I’m a creep!
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
Looks like a Renault Megane!
A gentle reminder to video in landscape mode, guys
Oh yeah Nick that toothpaste is definitely going back in the tube
Im curious how the error works…if one wheel is spinning at 45mph but the vehicle reads its status as under 4mph then it must be reading vehicle speed off another wheel? or by GPS?
Somehow Ive seen 3-4 of these in the wild, surprised the sales figure is under 2k.
Somehow I’ve seen 4 of these here in Clearwater area. Then again I saw another Ocean a few days ago.
Creepy
I hate creep mode.
It’s a carry-over legacy from torque converters that deserves to die.
I hate creep mode in EVs. It’s pretty much the only complaint of have with my Ioniq 5, the creep mode is on by default and you have to switch it off every time you turn the car on, or if you are shifting from reverse.
I haven’t experienced it, but my wife drives ours mostly and when I drive it I usually use the one pedal mode. I don’t remember why I started using one pedal mode, possibly because of creep.
Yes! Please Hyundai, just let the car default to iPedal mode if that’s what was most recently selected!
I rented an Ioniq 5. Loved it. But it actually seemed to turn off iPedal every time I engaged adaptive cruise control. And it beeped every time it did this. Is that normal?
I have a Niro EV, so I am used to it making a lot of beeps and bongs.
Yup, that’s what it does. It resets to Regen mode 3 on every start up. It’s my biggest (really only) complaint about the the car.
This company is bonkers. The balls on them showing up not just to sell this in the US, but to claim it was a luxury vehicle competing with other luxury brands was hilarious in the moment, and even funnier now.
That’s a pretty awesome oversight. I’m actually impressed someone would even do this. Did they code Creep Mode to just be cruise control with a hard-coded value (4mph)?
Are the vehicles they make for the other markets just as terrible or are they trying to do something different in the US market and just spectacularly failing here?
Maybe worth noting – creep mode only really matters in markets that are predominantly automatic transmission for combustion vehicles.
On a manual, no creep. So you likely get engineers who come from manual-dominated cultures who aren’t really familiar with the implementation gotchas and just know “Creep to 4MPH because product manager said so,” and then implemented in the laziest way possible.
I switch between a 27-year-old manual and a much newer automatic day-to-day, and didnt realize how bothersome the creep could be for those that are unaccustomed to its absence.
Funny thing you mention that because for work we work with Swedish company and their trucks do not have Creep (or as we call it IVM initial vehicle movement) the previous iterations of it were handled by a module from the US side of things so it worked fairly well but we have been working so our vehicles are near the same powertrain and control wise to that of our Swedish counter parts so the creep on our new trucks is awful right now, in drive it is okayish (jerks bit) but in reverse it is awful it goes from being nonexistent to oh shit I better slam on the brakes if not this thing is going to run into something. But I guess that is R&D for yah haha.