Ora brand sold a record 20,926 vehicles in December, the first time it has sold more than 20,000 vehicles, despite an image crisis over the chip configuration of its hot-selling model.

(Graphic by CnEVPost)

Despite an image crisis for Great Wall Motor's electric vehicle brand Ora due to a chip configuration issue with a hot-selling model, it doesn't seem to have affected its sales.

Ora sold 20,926 vehicles in December, the first time the company has sold more than 20,000, figures released by Great Wall Motor today show.

That's up 64.2 percent year-on-year and up about 29.7 percent from November.

For the full year 2021, cumulative Ora EV sales reached 135,028 vehicles, up 140 percent year-on-year.

Ora currently has four models on sale, the Black Cat, White Cat, Good Cat, and IQ, with the Good Cat being its main sales model.

Ora's announcement on its WeChat account shows that the Good Cat model sold 10,685 units in December. Full-year 2021 Good Cat sales were up 140 percent to 135,028 units.

Ora did not release breakdown sales figures for other models.

Notably, Ora previously said that the Good Cat model used Qualcomm's 8-core chip, but it was discovered that it was actually a quad-core chip released by Intel five years ago.

In the past few months, a large number of user complaints have forced Great Wall Motor into a whirlwind of public opinion and criticism by official media.

Ora previously said in the introduction page of Good Cat that it uses chips from Qualcomm with eight Kryo CPU cores, a Qualcomm Adreno 640 GPU graphics processor and a high-performance Hexagon 6 DSP digital signal processor.

Ora did not explicitly say so, but these specifications correspond to those of the Snapdragon 8155 processor currently used by mainstream EV makers in their flagship models.

But at the end of October last year, some owners discovered that Ora's Good Cat models sold in Thailand supported CarPlay, but the version sold in China did not have the feature.

It was then discovered that this was because Ora's Good Cat models sold in China were not using the Qualcomm professional in-car processing chip it said to use, but an Atom A3940 chip with four cores that Intel released in the fourth quarter of 2016.

This sparked a large number of owner protests, and Great Wall Motor offered several solutions, none of which were accepted by owners.

In its latest response on December 31, the company offered to provide an additional RMB 10,000 in cash compensation for these owners.

Great Wall Motor's Ora brand mired in user outcry over downgraded chip usage