VinFast Managed To Lose Over $700 Million In The First Quarter Of 2025

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, June 10, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at VinFast’s ruinous first-quarter finances, Bentley’s tariff pricing plan, a new truck merger between Toyota and Daimler and Uber’s robotaxi expansion in London.

It’s time to lock in for another fun day of car stuff and things.

VinFast’s revenue might be up, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the widening losses it’s seeing. In the first quarter of 2025, the Vietnamese automaker had an eye-watering net loss of $712.4 million. That’s a 20% increase from just one year ago. This happened despite the fact its revenue rose to about $656.5 million — a 150% increase. The cost of sales was a whopping $887.5 million in the first three months of 2025 — a 112.9% increase from the same time a year ago. Its operating loss was $485.6 million during the quarter, which represents a 20.3% increase.

In April, VinFast said it delivered 36,330 vehicles globally in the first quarter. That’s certainly an improvement over where it was. In fact, it was 296% better than the same time last year. It also saw big gains in its e-scooter unit, with sales jumping 473%. From Bloomberg:

VinFast’s billionaire founder and Chief Executive Officer Pham Nhat Vuong said in April that the company has no current plans to boost sales in North America and Europe due to high logistics fees and will instead focus on India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

[…]

Vuong, who has poured nearly $1 billion of personal wealth into VinFast in 2023 and 2024, pledged an additional $2 billion through 2026 to support the automaker’s global expansion. Vingroup has also committed as much as $1.4 billion in loans to VinFast.

As of May 31, Vingroup had disbursed $1.2 billion in loans to VinFast, according to the filing. Of the $2 billion Vuong has committed to provide VinFast in free grants, a total of $825.4 million has been disbursed as of May 31.

Right now, VinFast’s goal is to at least double EV deliveries in 2025. Last year, it only mustered 97,399 sales globally. If you consider the fact it only moved about 36,000 vehicles in the first three months of the year, VinFast is off its target of about 200,000 by quite a way. I suppose time will tell, but I’d also be curious as to how long Vuong — a smart businessman — will want to keep pouring good money into bad.

Bentley has paused some vehicle exports to the U.S. and is keeping its current prices through at least the end of June as President Trump’s tariff fiasco continues. Originally, the President imposed a 25% duty on all light-vehicle imports effective April 3. However, it came to an agreement with British officials on May 8 that lowered the tariff to 10% on the first 100,000 vehicles shipped annually to The States from the United Kingdom. After that, any UK-built vehicle is subject to the 25% tariff. Before this whole mess, vehicles produced in the UK were subject to a 2.5% tariff.

The bulk of imported cars from the UK come from Jaguar-Land Rover and Bentley. I guess Rolls-Royce counts too, but nobody who buys a Rolls gives a damn about tariffs. Anyway, it’s not totally clear how the cap of 100,000 vehicles will be allocated among those manufacturers, but it’ll likely have the side effect of incentivizing them to accelerate shipments to avoid higher duties after the 100,000 vehicle cap is reached. 

Because of this whole mess, Bentley can only guarantee its current pricing through the end of June, which is just a few weeks away. After that, well, who the hell knows? Bentley sure doesn’t. From Automotive News:

“Obviously, we are managing the tariff situation day to day,” Mike Rocco, CEO of Bentley Americas, said in an interview. “Every U.K. manufacturer is trying to understand the matter.”

[…]

Vehicles ordered by customers continue to be shipped and delivered, but Bentley has halted shipments of “stock” to the U.S. and is holding them in the United Kingdom.

Bentley started June with about 378 vehicles in U.S. dealer stock, Rocco said.

[…]

Rocco said Bentley raised U.S. prices, on average, by 0.5 percent on 2025 models compared with 2024 models.

Other Volkswagen Group members like VW and Audi have also agreed to hold their U.S. prices through June.

What a mess, man. I’m glad the only people this is really hurting are folks who want to buy a new car. The manufacturers will be fine regardless.

It’s been two years since Toyota and Daimler Trucks announced they were going to merge. Now, the two companies are finally getting around to actually doing it — forming a new global “truck powerhouse.” The two first announced their plans in May of 2023 to merge Toyota’s Hino and Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso. It has been a bit of a mess since then. From Automotive News:

At the time, the companies had hoped for a definitive agreement in the first quarter of 2024. But negotiations dragged on as Hino’s emissions and fuel economy testing scandal festered.

Hino, however, largely put the embarrassing misconduct in the past in March, when it pleaded guilty to emissions fraud in the U.S. and agreed to pay $1.6 billion in penalties.

Hino fell into trouble in March 2022 with the revelation it had been falsifying emissions and fuel economy data dating as far as 2003. The scandal snowballed later that year when Hino said new problems were discovered in a light-duty engine, among revelations in other power plants.

[…]

The Daimler side said Hino had sufficiently resolved its issues, clearing the way to move ahead.

“The Hino situation was quite severe after the emission fraud,” Mitsubishi Fuso CEO Karl Deppen said at a news conference, flanked by the leaders of Hino, Toyota and Daimler Trucks.

Daimler took a stake in Mitsubishi Fuso in 2003. Right now it owns about 89% of the company. Toyota took a controlling stake in Hino in 2001, and since then it has been a wholly owned subsidiary.

On June 10, the two companies said they reached a “definitive agreement” on a merger that would create a “new strong Japanese truck powerhouse.” The two will integrate on an “equal footing” and will combine to have about 40,000 employees, according to Auto News.

Uber and Wayve Technologies, a British self-driving car startup, are set to launch public-road trials of fully autonomous vehicles. It’s a first step for the American company that wants to bring self-driving cars to Europe.

The two companies say they chose London because of its has significantly different road layouts (read: non-sensical road layouts) and traffic laws compared with U.S. cities where most testing has been done so far. A more complex driving environment will allow the companies to better develop the tech they need to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale. From The Wall Street Journal:

Uber and London-based Wayve, which has raised more than $1 billion from investors such as Japan’s SoftBank Group, Nvidia and Microsoft, agreed to incorporate Wayve’s artificial-intelligence technology into Uber vehicles last year.

Wayve’s so-called Embodied AI allows cars to interact with, comprehend and learn from human behavior in real-world environments, the company said, effectively equipping vehicles with a robot brain that can adapt to unexpected situations.

“Our vision is to make autonomy a safe and reliable option for riders everywhere, and this trial in London brings that future closer to reality,” Uber’s Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Macdonald, said.

[…]

Uber and Wayve said they would work with the U.K. government and Transport for London on the permitting and regulatory approval process, adding that conducting tests in London would make it easier to deploy autonomous vehicles in European markets.

The two companies have yet to specify when trials in the UK would actually begin, saying they’d share more details on a timeline and potential vehicle manufacturer partners in the coming months.

These guys wouldn’t be the first self-driving companies in town, though. Trials for self-driving vehicles have been taking place in the UK since early 2015, according to WSJ. However, small scale taxi and bus services without a safety driver is new for the country.

History.com

Yeah, this is the greatest TV show ending of all time. Argue with a wall, or read more about it on History.com.

This song gives me the courage to land a plane in the Hudson River. Hopefully, it’ll be enough to get you through your dreary Tuesday.