Every driver is a salaried employee — no gig contractors, no personal vehicles brought to the platform.
Five hundred VinFast VF 8 SUVs hit Los Angeles roads on October 13. All company-owned. All driven . Green SM, the Vietnamese ride-hailing operator behind the rollout, is not using a contractor model. That choice separates it from every major US platform running today.
Green SM's Los Angeles entry is the first time a Vietnamese-backed ride-hailing operator has put a fleet of this scale onto US streets under an employee-driver structure. Uber and Lyft, which together held roughly 68 percent of the US ride-hailing market in 2024 according to Bloomberg Second Measure's annual platform report, published January 2025, rely entirely on independent contractors. Green SM's model more closely resembles pre-IPO Didi's salaried pilot programmes in Chinese tier-one cities between 2015 and 2017.
Green SM Opens Its First US Market With County-Wide Coverage
Green SM incorporated its Los Angeles operation before October 13 and placed vehicles across Los Angeles County from day one. Coverage extended south into Orange County at launch — an unusual geographic reach for a brand with no prior US operating history. The company originated in Vietnam in 2023, then spread through several Asian markets before entering Europe. Los Angeles is the first North American city in that sequence. Riders book through three channels: the Green SM mobile app, a dedicated telephone hotline, or a street hail. Fares are metered by time and distance. Early fare comparisons cited by transport media placed typical Green SM trip costs near Uber Comfort pricing, which sits above the standard UberX tier. Airport transfers — specifically service to Los Angeles International Airport — are listed among Green SM's stated US service intentions, though neither the company nor Los Angeles World Airports had publicly confirmed permit status or a start date as of the October 13 launch.
Fleet Size, Fare Incentives and Registration Data: The Numbers
The launch fleet comprises exactly 500 VinFast VF 8 units — five-seat electric SUVs with a dual-motor AWD variant rated at 402 horsepower. Green SM owns every vehicle outright; no driver contributes personal capital to the fleet. New-user promotions offer 50 percent off, capped at $12 per ride, across the first five trips. That maximum discount exposure per new customer is therefore 5 × $12 = $60. A Green Pass membership adds 10 monthly discount vouchers, each worth 30 percent off up to $10 per ride, for a potential monthly saving ceiling of 10 × $10 = $100. Against that customer-acquisition spend, S&P Global Mobility data cited in secondary reports recorded approximately 389 new VinFast vehicle registrations across the entire United States between January and July 2026 — meaning the 500-unit Green SM fleet alone exceeds that seven-month national retail registration count by 111 units, or roughly 28.5 percent above it.
CEO Frames the Model as a Trust Exercise, Not a Fleet Swap
Hoang Thanh Hang, chief executive of Green SM's US operations, addressed the employment structure directly in statements accompanying the October 13 launch. She said the company is not "simply expanding into a new market" but is instead working to build trust with customers, drivers and local communities "one journey at a time." She added that "the other half of the equation is the company's quality of service and intentional customer interactions." The framing is deliberate. Green SM supplies vehicles, maintenance and driver training. Drivers report to scheduled shifts rather than toggling availability through an app. That structure carries employer-side obligations — payroll taxes, benefits, fixed labour costs — that gig platforms avoid by classifying workers as independent contractors. California's Assembly Bill 5, which took effect in January 2020, attempted to reclassify many gig workers as employees; Uber and Lyft spent over $200 million on Proposition 22 in November 2020 to carve out an exemption. Green SM, starting as an employer, faces no such reclassification exposure.
Waymo's Driverless Expansion Adds a Third Competitive Layer
Green SM enters a Southern California ride-hailing market that already has two distinct competitive pressures pulling in opposite directions. Uber and Lyft anchor the contractor-driver, app-dispatch model at scale. Waymo anchors the zero-driver, fully autonomous end: Waymo One opened to all Los Angeles riders on November 12, 2024, operating without a safety driver in the vehicle. Green SM sits between those two poles — human drivers, but employed rather than contracted. In San Francisco, where Waymo has operated longest, the service completed an estimated 150,000 weekly trips by mid-2024 according to the California Public Utilities Commission's Transportation Network Company Annual Report, published August 2024. Los Angeles is geographically larger and structurally more car-dependent than San Francisco, which historically supported higher ride-hail utilisation per square mile in the Bay Area. Whether an employee-driver EV fleet can hold fare-competitive ground against a service with no labour cost per trip — Waymo — while also undercutting Uber Comfort on price remains the unanswered commercial question for Green SM in year one.
850 Million Global Rides Claimed — But US Registration Data Tells a Different Story
Green SM states it has completed approximately 850 million rides globally since 2023. That figure has not been independently audited, and no breakdown by country or city has been published by the company. The aggregate number implies an operating scale that the US registration data does not yet reflect. S&P Global Mobility counted roughly 389 new VinFast registrations across all US states in the first seven months of 2026 — a retail figure, not a fleet figure, but indicative of how thin VinFast's American footprint was before the Green SM deployment. The gap between 850 million claimed global rides and near-zero US brand recognition is not necessarily contradictory — Green SM's Vietnam and Asian operations are where that ride volume accumulated — but it means the Los Angeles launch is being built on a global track record that local riders have no direct way to verify. Neither VinFast nor Green SM had published a third-party-verified operations report covering the period from the 2023 Vietnam launch through the Los Angeles opening date.
VinFast delivered its first US retail vehicles in August 2023, starting with the VF 8 in California. The manufacturer's North American facility plans, announced for North Carolina, remain subject to state incentive negotiations that have not concluded. Green SM's 500-unit deployment is the largest single VinFast fleet placement recorded in the United States to date. Watch this market. The complete VinFast model history and specifications are catalogued in the Global Auto Index manufacturer database.
