Ora Lightning Cat Is A Powerful But Weird-Looking Chinese EV

With dual motors making up to 402 horsepower, it should be a good pick for performance-oriented buyers, but power isn’t everything.

Iulian Dnistran

By: Iulian Dnistran

Jan 18, 2023 at 5:26am ET

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Ora, which is just one of the names in the portfolio of the Chinese brand Great Wall Motors, is known particularly for its Cat-named vehicles. And no, this is not a joke.

Ora makes the Good Cat, the Punk Cat, the Funky Cat, and now it seems it’s making something called the Lightning Cat, which is the biggest and most powerful of them all. And our friends over at Wheelsboy got their hands on one which was spec'd in its highest performance trim.

And right off the bat, you can tell that the exterior of the EV looks a lot like a first-generation Porsche Panamera, a car that didn’t win any beauty contests, at least none that I know of. But while the outside looks like a knock-off Porsche, the inside reminds me of a Bugatti Veyron, with its flowing center console and round dials.

Gallery: Ora Lightning Cat

As the reviewer notes, the quality of the materials used inside is good enough, with soft-touch plastics on the upper part and harder, more scratchy plastics on the bottom half of the cabin – a practice a lot of mainstream manufacturers use, so it’s not that uncommon.

In the performance version, the Ora Lightning Cat has a dual-motor electric powertrain that makes a total of 300 kilowatts (402 horsepower) and 501 pound-feet (680 newton-meters) of torque, propelling the electric sedan from 0-62 mph (0-100 km/h) in 4.3 seconds.

In other words, it should make the car feel nimble and sporty, but as always, power isn’t everything. As you can find out in the video embedded at the top of this article, the Lightning Cat has a soft suspension and the steering lacks feedback and is over-assisted.

What do you think?

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As for range, Ora says you can get up to 373 miles (600 km) on a single charge from the EV’s 83.5-kWh battery, measured on China’s CLTC cycle.

Go check out the video and let us know what you think about this quirky Chinese family sedan in the comments below.