It’s no secret that VinFast, the sole Vietnamese company selling cars in the United States, has faced some… less than glowing criticism from the automotive press surrounding its VF8 midsize electric crossover. We’ve also previously covered how VinFast is losing an astonishing amount of money, and a couple of the most scathing instances of media criticism. And now, a video has come out of a VinFast VF8 going absolutely nuts when creep mode loses traction on a snowy hill.
Kyle Conner of the Out Of Spec Reviews team posted a video to Instagram demonstrating the alarming behavior, and it’s both hysterical and terrifying. Electric vehicles don’t naturally creep forward when you release the brake pedal in the way that internal combustion vehicles with automatic transmissions do, so most have a setting that allows owners to enable a creep function if they want. In the VF8, that creep mode increases throttle when encountering resistance in order to allow the car to creep even if it’s going uphill, but when that throttle increase does not mix well with low traction. Here’s what I mean.
The VF8’s creep mode turns into freak-out mode real quick
The driver of the VF8 does not touch the accelerator pedal throughout the entire affair; that’s all the car’s computer telling it to go into full freak-out mode as it encounters a low traction situation. As soon as one of the rear wheels loses traction on the icy hill, the car appears to send much of its power to that single wheel rather than limiting the power in creep mode. This causes the one wheel to spin violently, somehow smoking the tire even on ice.
The second attempt is arguably scarier, as the VF8 sends all of its power to the wheel that has the least traction which happens to be the driver’s side rear tire, causing the entire vehicle to rotate and slide down the hill, all without any throttle inputs from the driver. Both the first and second attempt on this video were performed with traction control fully engaged, which makes the freak out even more alarming.
For the third attempt, the driver disengaged the traction control and tried to let the VF8 creep its way forward up the icy slope, but the passenger side rear wheel loses traction so the car spins it up, creating a cloud of tire smoke and a stream of high-speed debris that pelts Conner as he walks behind the car. After this attempt the car’s instrument panel lights up like a Christmas tree, which feels on-brand. If for some weird reason you have a VinFast, be aware of this potentially hazardous tendency linked to creep mode.
