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May 10, 2023 16 minutes

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Ora Funky Cat

REPORT 3

£31,995 OTR/£32,790 as tested/£398 pcm

WHY IT’S HERE

Is Chinese domination of the small EV scene inevitable? We find out

DRIVER

Greg Potts

IT’S WELL KNOWN THAT THE NEXT MINI ELECTRIC WILL FEATURE MUCH of the same hardware as the Ora Funky Cat, thanks to a joint venture agreed between BMW and Ora’s overlords at Great Wall Motors.

It’s likely to be an all-new, collaboratively developed platform that underpins the next-gen Mini EV – which will once again look almost exactly the same as its combustion-engined counterpart – but it could potentially use the Funky Cat’s current motor or battery tech and so on. That’s one for the future though, because the Funky Cat has already arrived on our shores, so it’s time to pit the Chinese newbie up against the current generation Mini Electric, which first arrived in 2020.

The Mini is the quicker of the two. It gets 181bhp and 199lb ft of torque to drive its front wheels, meaning a 0–62mph time of 7.3 and a sprightly feel to the way it gets off the line. The Funky Cat makes do with 169bhp and a 0–62mph time that’s a whole second slower, although its bigger battery (48kWh plays 32.6kWh) means it’ll supposedly travel 193 miles on a charge compared to the Mini’s 145 miles.

But there’s polish to the way the Mini drives the Ora just can’t match. Both have fairly firm suspension set-ups, but in the Mini that means sharp handling and decent body control. Chuck the Ora into a corner and you never have confidence that it’s going to stick as it understeers heavily and offers no real feedback, even with the steering in the heaviest of its three settings. There’s a delay to your actions driving the Funky Cat too, with the accelerator and brakes ever so slightly slow to respond.

It was always going to be tough for Ora to face the Mini, and if it were my £35k-ish that I had to spend on one of these two, I’d be heading to a Mini dealer. And yet, getting the two cars together did help me to appreciate the slightly different direction that the Funky Cat takes.