Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast can begin construction of its planned North Carolina automobile plant after receiving a key government air quality permit, the company said in an emailed statement.
(Bloomberg) — Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast can begin construction of its planned North Carolina automobile plant after receiving a key government air quality permit, the company said in an emailed statement.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality issued the permit, the company said. VinFast is applying for other permits for the Chatham Country factory “and will begin construction soon,” VinFast said, without giving a specific date. It is in the process of selecting a contractor.
VinFast said a required US Army Corps of Engineers permit designed to minimize damage to water quality and wetlands won’t delay the start of construction, the Raleigh News & Observer reported, citing Nguyen Thi Van Anh, chief executive officer of VinFast North America.
VinFast had aimed to begin construction of the plant, which has a first-phase investment of about $2 billion, in September, the carmaker’s Chief Executive Officer Le Thi Thu Thuy said on the sidelines of the Qatar Economic Forum in June last year. US President Joe Biden in March tweeted that the factory was the “latest example of my economic strategy at work.”
VinFast, which filed for an initial offering with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in December, is considering the IPO as soon as the second quarter this year, Bloomberg reported last month, citing people familiar with the matter.
Thuy said this week that VinFast is still on track to start trial production at the North Carolina facility by 2024.
Until then, VinFast plans to make EVs at its factory in Haiphong in Vietnam’s north and ship them to the US. Customer handovers of vehicles delivered to California at the end of last year have been delayed to the second half of this month.
The delivery delay in part was because VinFast was waiting for certification from the US Environmental Protection Agency on the increase of its model VF8’s driving range, which is now 207 miles (333 kilometers), Thuy said this week.
(Updates with IPO in the fifth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected to say vehicle delivery delay was in part because VinFast was waiting for waiting for certification from the US Environmental Protection Agency on the increase of its model VF8’s driving range in the last paragraph.)
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