Judge me all you’d want, but there’s really very little here I don’t like. It’s a shameless knockoff of a 1960s-era Volkswagen Beetle, converted to electric power, stretched to four doors and glammed up an awful lot. It’s irreverent and fun and a bit silly, all things sorely needed in modern car culture. I wrote about it last week, but now this thing has more pictures and a name: the Ora Punk Cat. Wow.
Yes, the Punk Cat. Great Wall-owned Ora has a thing for naming their cars after cats — one of their other EVs is the Good Cat, and they also sell White and Black Cats. The name for this one was the result of an online poll with five other “cat”-based names, which included “big orange cat,” and “elf cat.”
New pictures reveal a very, very classic-Beetle inspired look, with bumper guards that mirror the shape of the ones used from the 1950s to 1967, a remarkably similar hood line (minus the old stiffening/decorative hood stampings) and, well, pretty much everything. This is a Beetle.
The headlights are clearly modeled after the famous Hella double-glass units used (in the U.S.) until 1966, and I’m going to say that, in a bold move, Ora seems to have been looking at the rare 50/50 Italy and Australia-only taillights as their inspiration for the Punk Cat’s.
The interior is even more bonkers and ornate than I realized before.
It’s done up in a beach-realtor’s office palette of teals and tans and lavender, and, very much unlike the original Beetle, everything looks to be lavishly padded and/or plated in some kind of shiny brassy metal-like surface.
It is, to put it mildly, a hell of a lot. It’s like your eccentric aunt’s apartment after your uncle died and she started working out and tanning a lot and then dating some dude with unsubtle ties to organized crime and now you barely recognize her and, if you’re honest, she scares you, a bit.
I do like those parquet floor mats, though.
Again, there’s about a zero percent chance, roughly, that this will ever enter the U.S. market, but I still like that it exists.