Marketing an electric vehicle in Vietnam: what a foreign brand is up against

Launch plans for electric vehicles are often written as if the category were new: explain the technology, build awareness, reassure early adopters. In many markets that is still the job. In Vietnam it mostly is not.

The category already has a reference brand with national scale, its own charging network and a service footprint in every province. Buyers have already formed their questions, and they are not about battery chemistry. They are about where to charge, who fixes the car, and what it will be worth when they sell it. A foreign brand arriving with a global campaign about design and range is answering questions nobody here is asking first.

This piece sets out what a foreign EV brand is up against in Vietnam — the market structure, the objections, the policy, the split between fleet and private demand — and how to measure the marketing so that the board sees what is actually happening.

A category with a local reference brand

The starting fact is scale. VinFast reported delivering 175,099 electric vehicles in Vietnam in 2025, nearly double its previous year, and described itself as the leading automotive brand by market share for fifteen consecutive months. Its smallest models sold most: 44,585 VF 3 and 43,913 VF 5.

For a foreign entrant, this changes three things at once.

• The reference price is local. Buyers have a clear sense of what an electric car of a given size costs here, set by a brand that manufactures in the country.
• The reference network is local. In the same release, VinFast reported more than 150,000 charging ports and 400 service workshops across all 34 provinces and cities. A buyer's first question to any other brand is how its answer compares.
• The reference experience is local. Many buyers considering a foreign EV have already test-driven, or own, the local one. The comparison is concrete, not abstract.

None of this rules out a foreign brand. It means the positioning has to start from a specific segment where the entrant has a real answer — a size class, a price band, a buyer type — rather than from the category as a whole.

Which market total you are measuring against

Market share reported to a head office needs a denominator, and in Vietnam the obvious one is incomplete.

The Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers' Association publishes monthly sales for its members. Its members sold 375,736 vehicles in 2025. VinFast and Hyundai Thanh Cong, two of the largest sellers, are not included and report separately: 175,099 and 53,229 vehicles respectively. Added together, the market is roughly 604,000 vehicles — and even that is a floor, because some other brands do not publish their sales at all.

A share calculated against the VAMA figure alone overstates a brand's position by about 60%. It is an easy mistake in a monthly report, and one that makes a launch look healthier than it is. Decide the denominator once, write it down, and use it in every report.

What Vietnamese EV buyers ask first

Across the market, the objections that decide a purchase are practical, and they come before specifications.

Where will I charge? Many urban households live in apartment buildings or narrow tube houses, where a private charger is not a given. A buyer needs to see a charging answer that fits their building, their commute and the places they already go. A map of fast chargers on highways does not answer a question about charging at home.

Who will service it? Coverage matters more than quality claims. A buyer outside the two largest cities will ask where the nearest workshop is and how long parts take to arrive.

What will it be worth? Resale value is the objection most often missing from the advertising. For a brand new to the market there is no used-car price history, so the buyer assumes the worst. Guaranteed buy-back values, battery warranties stated in plain terms and certified used programmes are all attempts to answer it.

Each of these is a marketing problem as much as a product one. Content that answers them — specific, local, verifiable — does more for a considered purchase than content about acceleration.

Turning the objections into something a buyer can check

An answer only works if the buyer can verify it. In practice that means three kinds of material, each built before launch rather than after the first complaints:

• Charging, answered by building and by route. Which residential buildings allow a charger to be installed, how installation is arranged and paid for, and what a month of home charging costs against public charging. Specific pages, not a map of stations.
• Service, answered by address. Named workshops, the time parts take to arrive, and what happens for an owner three hours from the nearest one.
• Resale, answered in writing. The buy-back or residual-value commitment, if there is one, the battery warranty in plain language, and a used-price record published as soon as one exists.

Much of the buying conversation in Vietnam happens in chat with a sales consultant, so each answer should also exist as something short enough to send there. Which of the three answers precedes a test drive most often is worth measuring; it tells the brand which objection is actually holding buyers back.

Policy that helps, and how far it goes

Two policies shape demand, one for cars and one for two-wheelers.

Registration fee. Battery electric vehicles have paid no first-time registration fee since March 2022. Decree 202/2026/ND-CP, issued on 8 June 2026, extends the exemption from 1 March 2027 to 31 December 2030, replacing the previous extension under Decree 51/2025/ND-CP. For buyers comparing an EV with a petrol car of similar size, this is a visible saving at the point of purchase, and it is now fixed for four more years — long enough to plan a launch around.

Hanoi's low-emission zone. Under Directive 20/CT-TTg, issued in July 2025, Hanoi is restricting petrol motorbikes in stages. The first phase, a pilot running from 1 July to 31 December 2026 in Hoan Kiem ward, limits petrol motorbikes on Friday evenings and at weekends in a small central zone and excludes petrol ride-hailing motorbikes from it. The zone is planned to widen in 2027 and to cover the whole area inside Ring Road 1 in 2028 and 2029.

For car brands, the second policy matters mainly as a signal of direction. For electric two-wheeler brands it matters directly, and the scale of that segment is large: VinFast alone reported selling 406,453 electric two-wheelers in 2025. Neither policy removes the three objections above. They make the purchase cheaper and more expected; they do not tell a buyer where to charge.

Fleet and private buyers are two different markets

A significant share of EV volume in Vietnam goes to commercial and service use. VinFast's two models designed for it, the Limo Green and the Herio Green, accounted for 39,695 of its 2025 deliveries — more than a fifth of the total. Ride-hailing and taxi fleets are a visible part of that demand.

For a new brand, the fleet market is tempting: large orders, vehicles seen on the road every day, and a faster route to volume. It is also a different business:

Neither is the wrong choice. What goes wrong is choosing both without saying so, and reporting them together. A strong fleet month hides weak retail demand; a slow retail month looks like failure when it is simply a long cycle. Report them separately from the first month.

Measuring a long purchase

An electric car is a considered purchase with a long cycle, and the usual digital metrics mislead in predictable ways.

Cost per enquiry says little. The enquiries a campaign produces this month mostly buy, if they buy, in later months. Dividing this month's spend by this month's sales compares two unrelated groups.

Measure by enquiry cohort instead. Group enquiries by the month they arrived, and follow each group forward. An illustrative example, with invented figures:

March looks like the best month on enquiries and the worst on test drives per enquiry. The cohort view shows it early, while the calendar-month view would only show it months later, as flat sales.

The test drive is the reliable midpoint. Between an advertising click and a signed contract, the test drive is the clearest sign of intent. It is also frequently recorded in a dealer's system that never reports back to the advertising, so the link has to be built deliberately.

Dealers, showrooms and who owns the lead

Most foreign car brands in Vietnam sell through dealers or a local distributor. That brings reach, and it brings three recurring problems for marketing.

• The brand and its dealers bid against each other for the same search terms and audiences, raising the cost for both without adding buyers.
• Leads are handed over and disappear. An enquiry passed from the brand's site to a dealer often has no recorded outcome. Without one, the brand cannot tell which campaigns produce buyers.
• Speed decides more than the advert. For a considered purchase the gap between enquiry and first call is often where the sale is won or lost, and it sits entirely outside the marketing budget.

Settling these in the dealer agreement — who runs which paid channels, how leads are routed, what outcome data returns and how fast — does more for the cost per vehicle sold than any campaign change.

What the board should see

A monthly EV launch report that a head office can act on needs fewer lines than it usually has:

• Vehicles sold, split into fleet and private, against a stated market denominator.
• Cost per vehicle sold for private buyers, by enquiry cohort.
• Test drives per hundred enquiries, by source.
• Median time from enquiry to first contact, by dealer.
• The three objections — charging, service, resale — and what changed in the answer to each this month.

The last line is the one most reports leave out, and the one most closely tied to whether private demand will build.

Where the figures in this article come from

VinFast's 2025 deliveries, model figures, commercial model total, charging ports and workshops are from the company's release of 13 January 2026; its electric two-wheeler figure is from its separate release on 2025 scooter sales. The VAMA total for 2025 and Hyundai Thanh Cong's figure are as reported by VietnamNet in January 2026. The registration fee rules are from Decree 202/2026/ND-CP of 8 June 2026 and Decree 51/2025/ND-CP. The Hanoi low-emission zone details are from Directive 20/CT-TTg and the phased plan reported by VietnamPlus on 24 April 2026. Company-reported figures are the company's own and are not independently audited.

Where this work stops

MWY does not sell vehicles, run advertising or take commission from dealers, platforms or agencies. For a brand preparing to enter, the segment choice, the answer to the three objections, the fleet-or-private decision and the dealer terms that govern marketing are part of Go-to-Market Strategy. Once the brand is selling, checking each month that cohort measurement, lead routing and fleet-retail separation still hold is part of Vietnam Marketing Advisory & Oversight.

What this looks like for an EV or mobility company already operating in Vietnam is set out on the EV and mobility page. How the measurement underneath it is built — definitions, the order record, and what a head office can rely on — is covered under marketing measurement.