VinFast has announced the official names of its three upcoming electric SUVs that were first revealed in concept form last year. The smallest of the trio is the VF e34 (previously the VF31) that occupies the C-segment, which followed by the VF e35 (previously the VF32) in the D-segment and VF e36 (previously the VF33) in the E-segment. According to the Vietnamese automaker, all three will have Level 2-3 autonomous capabilities with “30” smart features.” During the initial reveal of the concepts in January, the company confirmed that all three will have hardware that allows for up to Level 4 autonomous driving.
To enable these features, VinFast also
confirmed that it will be working with Nvidia and will use the technology
company’s Drive Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC) – based on its Volta 12 nm
architecture – in its EVs starting in 2022. The automaker will then upgrade to
the newer Drive Orin SoC across its entire range of premium EV models later on.
The newer Drive Orin SoC is built on
Nvidia’s seven nm Ampere architecture and is dubbed as the industry’s highest
performing autonomous vehicle (AV) processor. It features more than 21 billion
transistors, 12 Cortex-A78 ARM64 CPUs as well as programmable vision and deep
learning accelerators, allowing it process more than 254 trillion operations
per second.
This feature set is particularly important
to support special vehicle features such as cruise planning, locating charging
stations and dealerships, theft-risk warning, user habit preferences,
self-driving on highways, parking and more. Nvidia also revealed during its
recent GPU Technology Conference (GTC) that the SoC has enough power for
infotainment systems, and is designed to ISO 26262 ASIL-D standards for the
highest level of automotive electronics safety.
In terms of debuts, VinFast says the VF
e34 has already been launched in Vietnam, where it is priced at VND 690 million. For the money, you get an electric motor rated at 149 PS and 242 Nm of torque driving the front wheels, with power coming from a 42-kWh
battery that has a 10-year warranty. The company claims it takes 15 minutes to
gain 180 km of range with its fast-charging stations.
Meanwhile, the VF e35 and VF e36 are only
due to arrive in 2022. All three are also expected to be exported to the United
States (local production is also in the works), Canada and Europe next year.
