Great Wall Motor celebrated its first Singaporean showroom with an Ora EV convoy from Bangkok.
When it comes to electric vehicles, one of the biggest concerns is range and the viability of long-distance travel. Great Wall Motor (GWM) had a Singaporean showroom to launch and decided to kill two birds with one stone.
GWM has been in Thailand and Malaysia with the Ora Good Cat, an electric vehicle with a lot of personality. The company decided to take a convoy of these EVs from Bangkok to Singapore through Malaysia for this new showroom launch.
The GWM EV Convoy Tour consisted of 11 Ora Good Cats and traveled across 15 cities along its route over its 8-day leisurely drive. Each of these vehicles has an electric range of 500km. While range anxiety must have been an issue, the range would and pace of the trip would have helped tremendously. In any case, a multi-city trip is better experienced at a slower pace.
Ora and GWM in Singapore
GWM has established itself in Singapore with a local partner, Jardine Cycle & Carriage, who will serve as the distributor and dealer of Ora vehicles in the island-nation. The first vehicle to be launched there is the Good Cat, but in Singapore, it is being marketed as the Good Cat 03. In Singapore, it is equipped with a 63 kWh battery with just 420km of range. It also has a 105kW motor. It costs Singaporeans about SGD161,999, or RM550,000 to drive home an Ora Good Cat.
That may sound like an astronomically high, but a lot of that goes towards its Category A Certificate of Entitlement (COE), a mechanism the Singapore government partly uses to regulate the number of vehicles on their roads.
It’s also worth noting that despite costing half a million Ringgit to own, the Ora Good Cat is Jardine Cycle & Carriage’s most inexpensive passenger electric vehicle, and this is a company that currently works with brands like Kia, Citroen, Maxus and Mercedes-Benz in Singapore. In fact, Ora is their first EV-exclusive brand.
