Fiat 500E vs GWM ORA

What's the difference?

A fun, funky EV which will no doubt appeal to lovers of Italian style, but also one which struggles a little on the range and price front.

Still, there’s no doubt that electrification has improved the Fiat 500 formula.

The GWM Ora is a solid electric car for the city with an extremely competitive price, balanced with some flaws that might frustrate some - Android phone owners especially. But the GT variant doesn’t offer enough to justify how much more expensive it is than the variants below.

It has a slightly lower range, no more performance (not that it needs more power), a features list almost identical to the Ultra and arguably loses its appealing cutesy looks. 

While the rest of the Ora line-up has its strengths and a cute but daring design, the GT effectively offers only its bark-over-bite styling changes.

If the Ora is on your shopping list, it’s certainly worth checking out the $43,990 Ultra, or even the $40,990 Extended Range if its list of features suits you. But if you for some reason enjoy the GT’s styling, that extra spend might be worth it.

It looks, well, it looks like a Fiat 500.

It’s actually bigger in every dimension than an ICE cinquecento, but it doesn’t really look like it, which is a good thing.

The 17-inch wheels look great, and big against the very small Fiat, and I like the hidden doorhandles, which make the already smooth-looking 500’s flanks look a little smoother still. But I can take or leave the little DRLs up front that are meant to act as little illuminated eyebrows for the headlights, which come over a bit too cutesy.

But I think the highest compliment I can pay it is that it looks like a regular Fiat 500 — one of the most successful reincarnations of a timeless design ever — and not some modern, eco-friendly version that would have killed the look. 

In the cabin, however, it’s definitely a more modern affair, with the big screen, the horizontal push-button gear selector, and the nifty push-button door openers.

Still, it’s all pretty familiar Fiat 500, only a little nicer, even if some of the plastics are far too hard and scratchy for a vehicle this expensive.

There are five colours available: Ice white, Onyx black, Rose gold, Ocean green and Celestial blue.

Yep, as a step-up from the Ora Ultra, the GT’s main selling point is its styling. For a car with a 400km driving range, it’s so non-threatening it looks like it would get beaten up and have its lunch money stolen by dual-cabs if it left the city - but cute works, just ask Mini or Fiat.

Its headlights have a splash of Porsche 911 in them. There are some angles that even look a little like someone had an Abarth explained to them then tried to draw it. More than one friend has told me it reminds them of a VW Beetle.

None of that bothers me in particular, but the GT-specific additions to the Ora make it feel like a deeply unserious car.

The fake carbon trim is tacky on a car that has no performance improvement over its base variant sibling, the red strip under the number plate looks like a tongue poking out under an overbite, the wheels look like Tony Stark designed them, and the rear ‘wing’ and diffuser just don’t feel at home.

One thing that didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would was the lack of ‘traditional’ tail-lights, instead a light bar under the rear window takes that role.

The rest of the Ora range is cute, fun, and looks at home in the city where the Ora is at its best. The GT’s features are mostly the same as the Ultra, so the extra $3000 for the GT exterior doesn’t really feel like value.

Inside, however, the design is less in-yer-face. A tidy set-up features a Mini-style row of switches (for some of the climate control) under a bar that spans the dash with the vents integrated.

The steering wheel is big, arguably too big, behind it is the 10.25-inch driver display attached to the central multimedia display. Everything’s very tidy and minimalistic inside, even the gear selector is a round dial.

It looks like a reasonably fashionable interior, but when it comes to the functionality, it starts to fall apart.

The 500e is 29mm taller, 61mm longer and 56mm wider than the current ICE Fiat 500 (now 1529mm, 3631mm and 1683mm respectively), and it rides on a longer wheelbase, too .

That means more front-seat room and head room, but there’s still not oodles of space in the four-seat cabin, and especially in the back, where things are pretty tight.

I’m 175cm tall, and my head touches the ceiling in the back, and if I had another full-size human in the back with me, I’d want it to be someone I know well, because we’d be well and truly aquatinted by the time we got to our destination.

The front seats are more accomodating, but there is a strange tightness to the pedal area for the driver. It’s so tight, in fact, that when you rest your left foot, you have to be careful not to accidentally clip the brake pedal when driving.

The boot is a small 185 litres, too. But you’re not buying this for practicality perks, are you?

I can see the appeal of the Ora, but there are some glaring issues that I suspect many will find frustrating over time during ownership.

I’ll start with the big one - Android Auto. Or the lack thereof. Apple CarPlay is available however, even wirelessly.

Being a car journalist in 2024 involves a lot of playing around with in-car tech, and it’s been an awfully long time since I wasn’t able to mirror my phone to a car’s central screen where those with an Apple iPhone could. About 70 per cent of the world uses a phone running Android, by the way. Mostly Samsungs, like mine, but pretty much anything else that isn’t an iPhone too.

It wouldn’t be as major an issue if there was a navigation function in the car’s native multimedia system, but there isn’t. Having only a Bluetooth connection and no map felt a little like taking a step back in time, with an old iPad tacked onto the dash. No Fruit Ninja though.

Smaller things come down to basic ergonomics. The touchscreen itself and the system on it are simple and easy enough to use, if a little unresponsive. The driver display is fairly simple and doesn’t fall too far into the trap of sub-menus on sub-menus.

Physically, the cabin is almost there - the seat and steering wheel adjustment, however, made it a little tricky for me to find a comfortable driving position. 

I’m pretty much dead-on the average height of an Australian man, and the lack of tilt for the base of the seat meant no under-thigh support if I was to be the right distance to have a proper hold on the steering wheel - not telescopically adjustable, by the way.

Another interesting ergonomic fail is the placement of the drive mode select button (one of the GT’s few unique features) being to the right side of the steering column, near where you’d expect rarely-used controls like the headlight height adjust to be - or in this case a couple of centimetres from the button that kills the power to the battery if pressed while not in motion.

This caused severe embarrassment at a set of lights while searching for the drive mode switch, with no obvious way to start the car again, short of opening and closing the driver door.

Oh, and switching through the drive modes elicits a unique videogame-style chime or jingle for each mode. Gimmicky at first, potentially rather irritating after some time.

A positive of the interior layout, however, is the space in the rear seats is fairly generous for a small car - at almost six-feet tall behind my own seating position, I wasn’t lacking space to move and the seat itself is comfortable enough for a decent trip.

Behind that, a relatively limited 228-litre boot is probably less useful for a decent trip, though its 858L of space with the rear seats folded down is more handy in a pinch.

The GWM Ora GT was once a mid-$50K car, once you got it on the road. Its former sticker price of $51,990 before on-roads has, along with every other variant in the range, been dramatically knocked into a more budget-friendly shape: $46,990 drive-away.

That’s pretty cheap for a top-spec electric car, or for an electric car in general in Australia, but it’s still $11,000 more expensive than the entry-level Ora Standard Range ($35,990 DA).

The Ora GT also shares most of the key draw cards on its features list with the Ultra.

Its panoramic sunroof, electric tailgate, heated and ventilated seats with massage function and its heated steering wheel are all available in the Ultra for $3000 less.

One of the only things the GT has in terms of functionality in the cabin is a light for the driver visor vanity mirror.

There are a couple of differences when it comes to driving functionality, and we’ll get to that in a later section of this review, but the rest of the tech in the cabin is standard across the range.

The 10.25-inch touchscreen and same-sized driver display, six-speaker sound system, wireless phone charger, electrically adjustable synthetic leather seats - it’s all in the base-level Ora.

What is missing, very notably, is Android Auto functionality. The Ora does however feature wireless Apple CarPlay.

A single front-mounted electric motor delivers the power here, with 87kW and 220Nm on offer. Enough, Fiat says, to knock off 100km/h in 9.0 seconds. But it does feel quicker than that in real life, thanks to the way electric vehicles deliver their power.

There’s the usual EV single-speed gearbox, too, with power sent to the front wheels.

All four variants of the Ora have the same outputs from its front-mounted electric motor - 126kW and 250Nm. Yes, even the GT.

What the GT does have over at least the base model is a larger battery shared with the Long Range and Ultra variants, but despite having the same weights and outputs, the GT is, on paper, claimed to be a tenth of a second slower to 100km/h than the rest of the range: 8.5 seconds versus 8.4sec for the cheaper models.

The Fiat 500e’s 42kWh battery provides a smallish 311km driving range on paper, but when we got in it was more like 290km at 96per cent charged. A city car, then, rather than a long-distance hauler.

When it does come time to charge, you’re set up for 85kW DC fast charging which should take you from zero to 80 percent in 35 minutes. 

That aforementioned larger battery is a 63kWh lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery, over the 48kWh unit in the Standard Range base variant.

According to GWM’s brochure, the GT’s electric driving range under WLTP is 400km, 20km less than the Long Range and Ultra (and like the acceleration time, for no obvious reason).

With a 400km claimed range and 63kWh battery, the Ora GT should return a power consumption figure of around 15.75kWh/100km, though on test we saw 16.4kWh.

GWM claims charging with 11kWh AC power will take 6.5 hours to jump from 10 to 80 per cent charge, while 80kW DC charging takes 50 minutes to do the same.

This is the probably the best-driving example of the Fiat 500 I’ve ever climbed into. Sure, it’s not quite as engaging as self-shifting a perky little manual, but it’s smoother, easier and more comfortable, and a whole lot better than ICE vehicles fitted with Fiat's odd dual-logic automatic gearbox.

The EV transition genuinely suits the little Fiat, admittedly sapping a little character, but also thoroughly modernising the drive experience, with smooth, constant acceleration, sharp-enough steering and a ride that’s mostly settled, only really becoming crashy over the bigger road imperfections.

The small dimensions here also help the EV reincarnation. Yes, it’s heavier than you might expect, weighing in at 1290kg (tare), with the batteries adding several hundred kilograms to the equation, but the 500e still doesn’t feel overly heavy, with the little Fiat remaining pretty light on its feet.

There are three drive modes on board, including the catchy Sherpa mode (because it will help get you where you’re going), which, when you’re running low on battery, kills the climate control and anything else it needs to preserve range and get you home. 

But you can’t shake the feeling that the 500e is a little expensive for such a specialist tool. It’s unashamedly a city car, but one that will cost you more than $50k, and which doesn’t feel quite premium enough in the cabin to justify that asking price.

As is the case with the GT’s outputs and features, there’s nothing to suggest the GT would be fundamentally better to drive than any other variant. Unless all those kids at school were right about red bits making cars go faster.

The Ora’s front-drive layout paired with relatively immediate electric torque delivery, however, means you probably wouldn’t want it to be much more powerful with this particular mechanical setup.

The Ora, as a city car, does its job reasonably well in standard drive modes, though its sport mode is possibly a little too eager for day-to-day affairs - and the way it quite conservatively understeers on corners suggests there’s not much ‘sport’ driving to be done in this cute EV.

The steering itself feels fairly numb (again, fine day-to-day) and becomes heavier or lighter in different drive modes, but with no real advantage - the wheel itself is also a little on the large side.

Its suspension tune is comfortable enough for the low-speed streets on which this car is likely to find itself most often, where most city cars aren’t exactly riding on clouds, though can more obviously start to feel a little underdone on rougher roads at high speed.

It’s not a light car, after all, a hatchback that weighs 1580kg and has a short wheelbase isn’t going to be a dynamic masterpiece, though it does at least feel stable enough through corners thanks to its low centre of gravity.

It’s not going to encourage any heroic driving, but it’s also more likely to deter rather than outright punish any silly behaviour behind the wheel.

The GWM Ora’s safety features are almost all standard across the range, which is great even if you don’t opt for the GT.

This means its seven airbags (dual frontal, side chest, curtain and centre) are all standard, as well as autonomous emergency braking, secondary collision avoidance, rear cross-traffic alert and forward collision warning, lane keep assist, traffic jam assist and even a surround-view parking camera. The Ultra and GT are the only variants with a front parking sensor and auto parking assist.

The features are all there, but some finer tuning when it comes to some driver assistance could be looked at - thus the slightly lower side of the scoring scale for a car that’s ticking all the boxes on paper.

The fly in Fiat’s ointment is its ownership proposition, with a three-year, 150,000km warranty now way below par in Australia these days, even if the battery is covered for the standard eight years. 

Servicing is every 12 months or 15,000kms, and will cost $250 a pop for the first eight years, which is commendably cheap.

GWM offers a seven-year/unlimited kilometre warranty, as well as an eight-year/unlimited kilometre battery warranty. The former is quite decent for the industry, the latter relatively par when it comes to battery warranties.

Five years or 150,000km of roadside assistance is also included.

The Ora’s first five services, each coming in at 12 month/15,000km intervals, are capped price, all at $99.