When you arrive at the VinFast factory in Hai Phong, the first thing you notice is the sheer scale of the property. To call it a factory is a bit of an understatement. It looks much more like a small town with factory buildings the size of a city block. Built on a 900-hectare property, the factory can now produce up to 250,000 vehicles a year, and VinFast is working to increase that even more.
Disclaimer: VinFast paid for travel and accommodation for the author to attend this event.
Press Shop
Car production at VinFast’s Hai Phong plant in Vietnam begins in the expansive Press Shop. Here, rolls of raw aluminum and steel are cut into finished pieces, and then pressed into the body panels of VinFast vehicles with a series of dies. Today, VinFast produces internal combustion vehicles, with a clear path towards an all-electric future, which is why they are ceasing production of all internal combustion vehicles on August 31, 2022. They currently offer three all-electric vehicles starting with the e34 that we saw roaming the streets of Hanoi.
The Press Shop’s primary work area was on the second level, where Schuler’s large press resided. These large machines operate essentially autonomously, seamlessly moving process components through the manufacturing process. Die sets work like cookie cutters, where the top and bottom parts of the die are pressed against a piece of sheet metal to press into the desired shape. Watch the video above for a quick look at the Schuler press in action. The orange hands you see dancing in and out of the process use rubber cups to grab the metal components, moving them from one cut to the next. It’s a delicate dance, with little room for error along the way.
Pairs of dies stamp doors, hoods, trunk lids and more and can be interchanged to produce different vehicle parts. The machines used in the Press Shop weigh tens of tons each, requiring overhead cranes to move them in and out when the machines are overhauled for new product. Rows and rows of molds used to produce the various panels are stored on the first floor of the Press Shop, lined up like terracotta soldiers waiting to be called into action.
Completed body panels drain the discharge of the Schuler Press and are quickly deposited into bins for transport to the Body Shop. Image credit: Kyle Field
After being stamped, lines of workers visually inspected the panels before placing them in waiting racks. From time to time, one of the panels was pulled out of the mix for closer inspection on a stand specific to each component. The operation was massive but seemed to require very few people, with perhaps a dozen people manning the entire Press Shop operation during our visit.
Rows of identically extruded body panels await on the shelf for storage or assembly at the Body Shop. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
The Body Shop
From the Press Shop, the body panels were transported to the Body Shop where armies of ABB robots equipped with spot welders, suction cups and more, supported by a host of VinFast workers, welded the panels into the body in white. to weld at once. On average, a vehicle body requires more than 6,000 welds, making the Body Shop manufacturing equivalent of the Fourth of July, with sparks regularly shooting in all directions.
The scale of the Body Shop was difficult to capture in any single image, so here’s a video taken from our initial drive through the factory to give a sense of scale:
Each flash of spark turns into one of the thousands of spot welds required to join a car’s body. Some of the welds were quick and uneventful, while others shot sparks 20 feet into the air. VinFast’s Body Shop uses a very similar process to what we saw at Tesla’s Body Shop in Fremont, California when we toured it in 2019. As the process unfolds, what was just a few minutes earlier a pile of sheet metal emerges as a fully assembled vehicle body, the raw sheet glistens in the light of the factory.
VinFast’s Body Shop is highly automated, with ABB robots moving in-process vehicle body parts into position, welding them dozens of times at each station, and then moving them to the next step in the process. Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was dark and gloomy compared to VinFast’s bright and spacious Body Shop, although that was 3 years ago and Tesla has since integrated castings into the bodywork of its vehicles.
General assembly of the vehicle
After the Body Shop, the body-in-whites go through the paint shop. We didn’t get to visit VinFast’s paint shop, but we know it’s a spray process. At the paint shop, the paint is sprayed onto the metal bodies and they appear in whatever color is required for the finished vehicle.
That’s where the real magic of car manufacturing comes from. This is what most people imagine when they think of car factories. It’s a Henry Ford-esque treatment of the production line, with different parts of the vehicle being attached at each step, while the vehicle bodies are moved from step to step down the line in the process. It is very similar today, where the bodies are equipped with everything that makes them a real vehicle. The carpet is placed on the interior of the vehicle. The seats are bolted on, the dashboard is installed, and all the electronics are connected.
Marriage. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
For electric vehicles, one significant difference is that the electric motors and batteries are usually installed on the lower part of the chassis and joined to the upper part of the vehicle in a process called marriage. I’m not here to say who comes out on top in your marriage, but in car manufacturing, it’s always the body.
From there, wheels are attached, windows installed and doors adjusted before the finished vehicle moves down the line to a quality inspection station to ensure everything is working properly and the vehicle maintains a watertight seal. Although we saw VinFast’s general assembly line, we didn’t see it working because it was lunchtime and all the workers were on break. That’s life.
Components prepared for assembly with vehicles moving along the production line on an overhead conveyor. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
The current production line primarily produces internal combustion vehicles, and VinFast plans to stop production of all gasoline vehicles at the end of August this year. It will be a tough conversion to EVs for VinFast and shows their belief in the EV space and what they believe is an all-electric future. We’re all for zero-emission vehicles of any kind, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with VinFast’s decision to accelerate the adoption of battery electric vehicles and scooters in Vietnam and around the world.
Battery factory
The core of every electric vehicle is the battery and VinFast showed us its production line dedicated to their assembly. The current Battery Factory takes pallets of Samsung SDI 21700 4,800 mAh external batteries and assembles them first into modules and then into packs. These packages are then fully tested before being pushed out the door, ready for installation in an electric vehicle.
The battery modules are assembled at VinFast’s Hai Phong factory in Vietnam. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
As it stands today, the Battery Factory is just a fraction of what’s to come. VinFast is currently building its own lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility with the help of a number of manufacturing partners. Construction on the new factory in Ha Tinh, Vietnam, began in December and is on track to be operational in the next 2 to 3 months, according to a company representative we spoke with. The new factory will initially have a production capacity of 100,000 packs per year with plans to increase to 1,000,000 packs per year over time.
The battery modules are checked before being sealed in the finished package. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
Building the battery cells in-house at a new factory 120 miles away will streamline the current process and should help them lower battery costs for VinFast. It also puts control of the most critical component of electric vehicles in their wheelhouse. If successful, manufacturing batteries in-house could be a key differentiator from the competition. The earliest leaders in electric vehicles began by sourcing cells from outside suppliers and inevitably either brought cell manufacturing in-house or formed joint ventures with battery cell suppliers.
All together
VinFast is a new player in the electric vehicle space and while it’s hard to see what they’re doing from a simple press release or vehicle launch, seeing is really believing. Based on what we saw of parent company VinGroup and VinFast’s factory in Hai Phong during our visit, VinFast is doing everything to make its vision of an all-electric future a reality.
From a fleet of all-electric scooters (more on that in another update) to a rapid conversion to 100% electric vehicle production on the automotive side in just a few weeks, VinFast is leveraging the full VinGroup ecosystem to accelerate the transition to all-electric vehicles as quickly as humanly possible.
Disruption of entrenched industries is difficult. It’s doubly so when the disruption is caused by a startup from a country not known for manufacturing cars, but VinFast is making steady progress. They transformed this 900-hectare plot in Hai Phong from a mud pit into a factory producing vehicles and scooters in just 21 months and are attempting a similar feat at a new factory in North Carolina in the eastern United States. It’s time to go. This is where things get tricky.
Everyone we talked to at VinFast welcomed the challenge with a smile and answered it directly with convincing confidence in their voice. Having already seen what they achieved in Vietnam, we will be eagerly watching and cheering them on every step of the way. We believe the future is electric and the future is now. Thank you to all the entrepreneurs, visionaries, companies and individuals working to make their unique visions for a better future a reality.
VinFast VF 8. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
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