Mileage: 3450

Life with an Ora Funky Cat: Month 4

Just one teensy part can stop a whole machine from working – 24 May

Strange. I can’t get this 50kW CCS plug into the Funky Cat’s charging port. Let’s try the 43kW Type 2. Nope, same problem: it goes 90% of the way in but doesn’t clunk into place and the charger then can’t communicate with the car. This is frustrating.

We’ve already wasted half an hour of a glorious Sunday afternoon looking for a charger, fruitlessly trying to scrabble together enough electrons for a half-lap of the M25, and my patience is running thin by this point. Best I don’t quote my reaction verbatim here.

My partner, more level-headed than me and clearly less personally invested in the situation, having been scrolling through Instagram for the previous 10 minutes, takes a calmer and more logical approach.

I hadn’t even considered Googling, assuming the Funky Cat’s newness and rarity meant the forums were unlikely to be a goldmine of helpful information from experienced owners. But as luck would have it, some poor soul had recently been in this very boat – and in much more perilous circumstances.

“Urgent help needed,” reads the post she found on an EV forum. “I’m on holiday in Cornwall and the pin inside the charging portal seems to be locked, so I can’t fully connect any charger. It usually displaces into the hole in the charging cable when pushed in. I need to go home on Wednesday and cannot charge!”

Immediately the prospect of me being a bit late for a family barbecue seems slightly more trivial.

Anyway, this is brilliant intel. Armed with this knowledge, we aim our phone torches into the port and spy the offending pin – an offensively tiny part, considering the amount of hassle it’s causing.

One commenter on the forum had suggested disconnecting the 12V battery to reset the system and clear any bugs, but I’m loath to do that because I don’t want to restore all the settings to their factory defaults and my 14mm socket is at home, by now a 20-minute walk away.