When VinFast broke ground in North Carolina in 2023 it had big promises. 

The Vietnamese electric vehicle maker planned to build a 2,000-acre manufacturing facility in Chatham County that would produce up to 150,000 vehicles a year.

The company said it was investing $2 billion, and the facility would produce 7,500 jobs.

In 2023 then-Vinfast Manufacturing CEO Van Anh Nguyen told Spectrum News, “There are still not many companies or their products in the market so we see that it’s a huge opportunity.”

But three years later none of that has happened yet.

“It was, on paper, a good idea. Unfortunately, it didn’t fall into our strategy of strategic outlook because electrification wasn’t at the volume they needed it to be,” said Autoforecast Solutions President and CEO Joe McCabe.

Production has faced numerous delays, and job projections are a sliver of what they once were.

“Maybe at the time they meant well and were intending on following through on their deal, but then they broke it,” North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson told Spectrum News in June.

In May, Jackson sued VinFast to get the land back, alleging the company breached its agreements with the state.

“I want our money back,” Jackson said.

Attempts to reach VinFast for a statement were not successful.

In a statement to Spectrum News a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Commerce said it’s “dedicated to protecting taxpayer investments and ensuring that all performance-based economic agreements are fully honored. Because this matter is now the subject of active and pending litigation in Wake County Superior Court, the department cannot provide further comment on the specific details of the legal proceedings at this time. 

VinFast is by no means the only automotive company that took a swing on EVs in the U.S. and fell short.

“The only manufacturer making profit in this is Tesla. Everyone else is losing money, and they’re losing money hand over fist,” McCabe said.

While EVs account for a much greater share of vehicles in other countries, it’s not been the case in the U.S.

In 2024, BloombergNEF estimated EVs would account for 48% of U.S. passenger vehicle sales in 2030.

Last year it lowered that projection to 27% and now it estimates it will only be 17%.

“People were fed up with saying you’re forcing me to drive a $60,000 vehicle where the infrastructure has proven not to be good, where range anxiety still exists, even though that’s been dissipated,” McCabe said.

The Republican-controlled Congress also ended the clean vehicle tax credit, which was passed under the Biden administration much quicker. The credit expired at the end of September.

“The thought was if we light the fuse with a subsidy then that fuse will stay lit by itself, and it just didn’t. As soon as you took it away there was a precipitous drop in sales,” McCabe said.

As for VinFast, the company’s chairwoman recently said they expect to resume construction of the North Carolina site this year.

“We are skeptical,” McCabe said.

One company that has had success in the market and opened a battery manufacturing facility in 2025 in North Carolina is Toyota.

The reason it’s had success is the company focused on hybrid vehicles, a mix of electric and gas, seeing that as a bridge to eventually getting to fully electric. 

And while EVs will likely dominate the U.S. market at some point, it’s perhaps much farther down the road than once thought.