The BYD Atto 3 and MG4 are great, but there is one cheap Chinese electric vehicle that’s not quite there yet…. Opinion

Of the many minor miracles that Tesla managed when creating actually desirable electric vehicles – as opposed to the turgid turbine-like twaddle of their predecessors – the ability to get prodigious amounts of torque to the ground without frying tyres, or scaring drivers, is perhaps not given enough credit.

There was a time when brave car companies, and Saab in particular, thought it would be amusing to build cars with silly amounts of torque and then attempt to put it through the front wheels alone.

This led to what was known, amusingly, as an “automatic lange-change function”, or, more prosaically, savage torque steer (the Saab Viggen, in particular, was infamous for it).

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Today, of course, an EV can deliver 100 per cent of its torque from zero rpm, which should, and can, prove a challenge for any set of tyres. Cleverly, Teslas are either rear-wheel drive or all-wheel drive. Interestingly, Polestar recently switched its Polestar 2 from front-wheel to rear-wheel drive, a smart move that’s actually a lot simpler with EVs than it would have been in ye olde days.

Occasionally, however, we journalists are lucky enough to find out just how badly wrong things can go if a car company decides to put EV torque through the front wheels of a car alone, and then also chooses to give that car tyres made out of old dish cloths.

I recently spent a week in the GWM Ora, a car that would have made even Saab’s semi-suicidal engineers blanche in fear. It’s not that the Ora – which is more amusingly called the Good Cat, or even Funky cat in other, more fun markets – isn’t a generally solid offering, and nor is it overly powerful, boasting just 126kW and 250Nm. It’s just that it seems to have no clue at all how to put that grunt to the ground in an even borderline normal way.

Apply throttle while cornering and you will hear a kind of screeching sound. The first few times I wasn’t even sure what this awful noise was, then I realised it was coming from the wheel that was utterly failing to get any traction.

Quite often, you will also get to hear this sound when you attempt to take off up a hill, or too quickly on a flat surface. It’s as if the tyres just don’t know what they’re supposed to do, or they’ve been mugged and badly beaten by the torque.

Then I was lucky enough to drive the Ora in light rain, and wow, that was something. I’ve experienced some nasty wheel spin and torque steer in overpowered front-wheel-drive cars before, but they actually had a lot of torque. The combination of going slowly and yet going nowhere, while the front wheels flail about like a penguin with its flippers glued together, was really quite unique.

I don’t want to suggest that this car was unsafe, because that would be unkind, and because the GWM Ora seems heavily invested in the idea of safety. This a five-star NCAP rated car, and it has more bongs, whistles, alarms and flashing lights connected to its safety systems than the entirety of the control panels at Mission Control in Houston. I don’t know, even after a week together, what most of them mean.

It would be fair to mention at this point that the GWM Ora is cheap, very cheap, just about the cheapest EV money can buy.

I know I wrote something on this very site recently about how I’d come right around on Chinese cars, after driving the MG4, and that I now had hope for a more enjoyable future, but I don’t think front-wheel-drive EVs are the way forward, unless you want to enter that future entirely sideways.