Vietnamese carmaker VinFast has just rolled out its first two models, the VF6 and VF7, in India, with plans to introduce one model every six months. Speaking on the sidelines of the launch event, Vincent Pendlebury, chief engineer, VinFast, told t2 what the brief was for him to adapt the cars for the Indian market and what the wow factors are. Excerpts.

The Vinfast VF6 and Vinfast VF7 were already available in Vietnam. So, what was your brief when you were adapting them for India?

Well, of course the first adaptation is to make it right-hand drive. That’s actually quite an important consideration because often with vehicles you may have actually created issues in the original design that are very difficult to then address. Fortunately, with EVs (electric vehicles), because of the symmetry within the car, it isn’t often much of an issue.

So, then the next question that really comes along is the consumer taste and the feature content you have within the car. Because the design itself is given, to look at the feature content, we did a lot of clinics with Indian consumers, even up to almost 12 months ago. We were doing that using the Vietnam models. And one of the things that became abundantly clear was that the Indian consumer was looking for rich feature content. They want to feel they’ve got a lot for the money that they’re spending. And so that’s something we’ve done very deliberately. Even if we look at the base spec VF6, if you compare that with say the equivalent specification car in Vietnam, you realise that actually the feature content is much, much higher even though that’s the entry level model.

VinFast VF7

The other thing that really became clear is around the infrastructure and the road conditions. We understood really within India through the drives that we’ve done and also anecdotally and through the knowledge of the industry that the road conditions are quite severe in some situations even in urban roads. So, that’s why quite deliberately on VF6 it is a higher ride height than in Vietnam. So the ride height here is 190mm. In Vietnam I think it’s around 165mm. So, to do that was a little bit more than just shocks and springs. It was actually the suspension geometry that has changed. It is actually quite a significant impact.

Then there is looking at tyre selection. Again, one of the things that, because it is a contemporary European style in most of the other markets, we have large wheels, low-profile tires. But again, that is incompatible. We don’t want to have our customers getting flats every time they hit a pothole. So, again very deliberately on the VF6, we have 18-inch wheels and that’s not offered in any other market. Plus you have the ride quality to go with it. And also using Indian branded tyres as well because then you understand that the tyre construction is much more suited to the road conditions.

And then the final thing really is around safety. I spoke about the passive safety elements. The car is a global design for crash performance, but it is quite deliberate that within the Vietnam market we have seven airbags to give it that much higher protection. We are going through a campaign at the moment for the Bharat NCAP. So, before the end of the year we’ll be able to announce the star rating for Bharat NCAP, which is the specific NCAP requirements for the Indian market.

It’s very difficult to sell to a customer the benefits of things like Level 2 ADAS. I mean, sometimes people are struggling to understand using cruise control on their car. And then you’ve kind of got adaptive cruise control, but once you start to drive the cars, and particularly recognise some of the intervention, whether it’s lane keep assist, or advanced emergency braking, or we’ve got the rear cross traffic alert. So, as you’re reversing out of a parking space if you don’t see another car your car will stop automatically and alert you so that you avoid the accident. It’s only when you actually are subject to that intervention do you realise the benefits.

I know from my own experience it’s that time when you get distracted with the children in the car or because your phone buzzes and then you look down and then when you look up the car has already intervened because it has recognised something has pulled out in front of you and activated the brakes. And those are real to me. They’re really important features on the car that are becoming more and more standard on global vehicles but it becomes quite country specific.

So you have to adapt to the Indian market, Indian conditions, particularly road conditions, and then particularly at, say, feature content to make sure it’s appealing to the Indian consumer. I mean we’ve not thrown everything at the car. It’s a little bit like with your phone, you might have 200 apps on your phone, but you’re only using 20 of them or 10 of them. We’ve actually been quite specific on how we address that.

One thing I noticed was that the steering stalk setup is still for left-hand drive. The other thing is you don’t have an instrument cluster in front of the driver. Nowadays, in a lot of Indian cities we have these low speed limits like 50kmph or 40kmph. So, how do you see it when you are driving?

The first thing is around the stalks and that’s something we did doing consumer testing and it was viewed as a preference but it wasn’t viewed as a must-do. I think it very much follows some of the luxury cars. So, we we didn’t see it as a massive thing. But equally, it’s one of those features that if you do start to look to change it, there is actually a lot of development work in that. It isn’t so straightforward because it is an integrated safety feature in the car. It has to work. It has to work every time. There wasn’t massive demand for that, so we made a conscious decision not to do that now.

About the instrument cluster now around the instrument cluster the cars have head-up display (HUD). From a legislative point of view, you do actually have to have the certain telltales and certain indication within certain zones of the car. So, within the large 12.9-inch screen, they are positioned in that zone to be compliant. That’s actually really important so although it may not be so obvious there is a bias in your display to make sure that they are in the visible zones. What we’ve actually done is replace the driver console with the with the HUD and we found that customers very quickly adapt to it and actually prefer that and they really notice it when they go back into a conventional car and realise there’s just something in front of them that’s maybe robbing a little bit of the down vision and it’s not adding a massive amount of benefit.

Can you have the navigation and all getting reflected on the HUD?

Some of the turn-by-turn will be on the on the HUD but the main nav and map won’t map on the HUD. It will have those sort of key turn-by-turn on the head up display.

And there aren’t too many switches, I mean apart from the piano thing for the gears. So everything will have to go through the screen, right?

It is, again, something that came out of a lot of the consumer testing. And what we realised is what’s more important is that you have that quick accessibility to features. If you want, for example, change the HVAC controls, it’s within one button. Or if you want to change the vehicle dynamics, whether the mode that the vehicle is in, it’s all within one button for us. It’s not buried two or three items deep in the menus. So we find that that works quite well, and certainly when customers become aware of where everything is because there isn’t the visual cue sometimes to actually go for it. Once they’re aware then people actually become very adaptive towards it. The volume control and the on-off switches are actually in the console.

You talked about Indian customers looking for premium features. Can you give us some examples of the premium features?

I think the panoramic roof is not a normal mainstream offering in the market. It is actually a little bit, you know, to give it that premium feel.

Certainly the choice of materials is something that we deliberately try to do and also be mindful. We’ve deliberately gone for the vegan leather, for example, but have it very, very rich within the car.

To me it’s the little things. It’s like the ventilated seats. You don’t notice it until you’re in a car without ventilated seats and, again, to me it’s these features which become a surprise and delight to people that make the most difference because they often don’t realise that they’re there and it’s something that makes them smile once they recognise it. They say, okay, somebody has been quite thoughtful about this.

It’s things like, for example, the hill hold. So as you drive and bring the car to stop on the hill, it will activate the park brake. So you don’t have that kind of roll back. And again, you’ll only notice that the first time you you use it I think.