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Hello MG IM5

I have said goodbye to the Funky Cat, and it’s hello to the MG IM5.

The main reason for switching to the MG IM5 was the fact that it comes with a 100kWh battery which provides for a combined WLTP range of 441 miles and a city WLTP range of 544 miles. Compare that with the WLTP range of the Funky Cat WLTP range of 193 miles. I do realise that WLTP ranges are a theoretical maximum, but I am still expecting to get over four hundred miles from a 100% charge.

I wrote recently about the issues with the Funky Cat when charging to just 80%.

A Tesla Model 3 with a WLPT range of 332 miles then an 80% charge would give you around 267 miles. However, my Funky Cat with an 80% charge would get just a 128 mile predicted range. 

The MG IM5 with the 441 mile range would, at a 80% charge have over 350 miles.

When I first got the Funky Cat, most of my driving was lots of local drives and carrying four to five people. The Funky Cat was ideal for that. However after driving the Funky Cat for three years, I am doing a lot less local driving, and more long distance driving. 

Some of the other reasons for switching to the larger MG IM5 are:

The bigger boot – The Funky Cat could carry five people comfortably, the downside was the boot was very small. I remember driving to the airport and having to put one of the suitcases the front seat as it wouldn’t fit in the boot with another suitcase. On a trip to France and Belgium, we had to stuff the boot with bags and around the passengers as well in the main part of the car.

Charging speed – the Funky Cat had a maximum charging speed of around 50kWh. This meant that going from 10-80% would take about an hour. The MG IM5 with an 800v technology can take a 396kWh maximum charge and theoretically will take 17 minutes to charge from 10-80%. Of course not all chargers can deliver that kind of charge, but with a 150kWh charger I am expecting that a 10-80% charge would take around thirty minutes, so more charge and less time.

Charging frequency – with a 48kWh battery I found, especially on longer trips, I would need to make multiples stops to charge the car, I am expecting with the MG IM5 to charge less frequently on those kinds of trips. On a recent trip to Warwickshire, the Funky Cat had ran 80% charge, I charged twice on the trip and then needed to charge again before heading down to Exeter a couple of days later. With the MG IM5, if I had an 80% charge, that would have provided me with around 350 miles. I would have had enough charge for the trip to Warwickshire and would also get me to Exeter and back. 

The MG IM5 feels like it will be a better car than the Funky Cat, which isn’t too surprising. Even so, I still have some concerns, mainly about the size of the MG IM5. The MG IM5 is 68.6cm longer than the Funky Cat. It is 13.5cm wider, though if you include the wing mirrors it’s only 6.7cm wider! However the Funky Cat is taller by 12.9cm.

Though the Funky Cat is regarded as a “small” car it was bigger than the Nissan Juke which I had for a few months as a courtesy car. The Juke felt bigger to me, but was in fact smaller than the Funky Cat on height, length and width.

Another concern, though some might see this as a plus, is that the performance of the MG IM5 is much better than the Funky Cat, it accelerates faster and has more power. I’ve never really felt the Funky Cat was underpowered, it accelerated well onto motorways and never had problems with hills.

On the online forums, there are many gripes about the software, but I am not too worried about that, as I have had many issues with the software on the Funky Cat. Could it be any worse?

Overall I am looking forward to enjoying the MG IM5, and I will continue to write about my adventures and challenges in the blog.

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Goodbye Funky Cat

Today I said goodbye to the Funky Cat. It was a salary sacrifice lease deal through work, and I have been driving the Cat for three years.

The Funky Cat was my first experience of owning and driving an EV and I will say it has been a positive experience. Though there have been some issues on that journey one the last three years. I wrote 127 posts about the Funky Cat.

The main positives have been as follows.

The ease of driving what is essentially an automatic car. My only previous experience with an automatic was back in March 2006 when I rented a Volkswagen Passat up in Scotland. That was an awful experience. I struggled with the accelerator and the brake. Of course the main reason was that I would normally drive a manual car, so was use to using both feet. Driving the Funky Cat I had to train myself to not use the left leg. It really didn’t take that long to get the hang of it, if anything my awful experience up in Scotland with the Volkswagen helped me in understanding the dynamics of driving an automatic. However over the three years of driving the Funky Cat, my left arm would often drop down to change gear, with the non-existent gear stick.

Probably the one safety feature which I now appreciate, that for many months I did turn off, was emergency lane keeping. Though I then started to think, is if it is doing it as much as it is (which was annoying) maybe there is an issue with my driving. So, I now leave it on and try to ensure my driving is in lane. On some country roads with poor markings, I do turn it off, but for main road driving I keep it on.

Initially I didn’t realise that there was a Smart Cruise Control functionality with the Funky Cat. It was only after reading a post on the Facebook that I realised that I could use this option. Under Smart Cruise Control the Funky will maintain the car in the centre of the lane it is in, as well as maintaining a consistent speed and a safe distance. I was impressed with the Smart Cruise Control, however it did appear to kill the battery and reduce the range (I think part of the reason was that it turned off regenerative braking). More long distance motorway driving, the technology was impressive in keeping the Funky Cat in lane and not too close to the cars in front. However, with motorway driving, you also want to have the range, so now use it rarely.

I did use the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) on the Funky Cat quite a bit. Unlike traditional cruise control, as well as maintaining a constant speed without using the accelerator, it will also change the speed to ensure that the Funky Cat maintains a safe distance to the car in front. I did miss the speed limiter which I had on previous cars.

I liked how it could carry five adults in comfort. The back seats had plenty of leg room, even with the driver’s seat set quite far back. That was one of my initial use cases in choosing a car, could it seat five adults.

The main challenges were (and in no particular order).

Firstly, was turtle mode. I was going for a short drive when the reduced power warning light came on, this is a yellow tortoise, not a turtle. Lost all power to the drive train. Pressing the accelerator didn’t work. I crawled to a halt, but managed to stop safely on the side of the road. Turned the power off waited a few minutes and set off again. As soon as I slowed down for a junction it came on again and I lost power. This was down to a coolant issue with the motor overheating. The electric motor got too hot, but the coolant system didn’t kick in. It had to go to the dealer for a software update.

Secondly the charging infrastructure, when I got the car down in Weston-super-Mare. I didn’t have a home charger and in Weston there were only two rapid chargers (150kWh). My experience with other fast (ie slower) chargers were that either they didn’t work, or were been taken out of commission. On a long journey to York in September 2023 it was challenging to find a vacant charger at the motorway services I visited.

However, over the three years I have seen massive improvement in the charging infrastructure, both locally and as I have travelled. Weston now has over twenty rapid chargers. I have used the fast chargers at the railway station on a regular basis once they were installed six months after I got the Funky Cat. I have also appreciated the installation of chargers at the National Trust properties I have been visiting. This makes it much simpler to plan journey and when to charge. The Tesla supercharger network also started rolling out availability of their chargers to non-Tesla cars and as they are significantly cheaper than chargers such as InstaVolt and Gridserve, they have been my go to chargers when travelling. When I got the Funky Cat there were none close to me, over the last three years they have opened up the chargers at Cribbs Causeway and Eastville. Though the enforcement of the 80% congestion charge has been frustrating with the short range of the Funky Cat. 

Talking of range, the Funky Cat had a WLTP range of 193 miles. I never achieved that figure, the highest predicted range I ever got was 185 miles, however that was when the Funky Cat was “new”, now three years later I am getting a top range of 170 miles.

When I first got the Funky Cat, most of my driving was lots of local drives and carrying four to five people. The Funky Cat was ideal for that. However after driving the Funky Cat for three years, I am doing a lot less local driving, and more long distance driving. For local driving the range of the car is almost immaterial, however for anything over 75 miles, I then need to think about and plan on where I am going to charge. Sometimes it’s easy, as with many National Trust properties which have chargers, I arrive, plug in, enjoy my day and return to a charged car. Otherwise I plan stops where there are the cheaper Tesla chargers, sometimes these are in the middle of nowhere (it appears), other times they are based in shopping services, motorway services, or a farm shop.

Though the Funky Cat could carry five adults in comfort, the sacrifice was the boot size, just 228 litres. Though it was also an awkward shape as well. When the rear seats are folded down, the boot space expands to 858 litres. Even when it was just me travelling, I could fill the boot quite easily with a suitcase, my laptop bag, and the coffee machine! Once heading to the airport with four of us and just two suitcases, we needed to put one of the suitcases on the front seat, as we couldn’t make two of them fit in the boot.

One real challenge was four of us headed to France, then we needed to be a lot more imaginative when it came to luggage, reducing the amount of what we took, but also avoiding suitcases. We did it though.

The Funky Cat did not have a rear window wiper, it also had a very small rear window. This meant driving the funky Cat was like driving a van, a lot of reliance on using the wing mirrors. Parking was less of a problem, as it did have a 360 degree camera system.

When I got the Funky Cat, it did not support Apple CarPlay, as a result I would have to perch my phone on the dashboard when I was using Waze. Eventually there was an update that would enable CarPlay, so I booked it in with the dealer.

The dealer had the car for the whole day, but didn’t start the update until close to the end of the day. The update failed, so they needed to keep the Funky Cat to try again. 

In the end they had for three months. They killed the head unit so it needed to be replaced. When I eventually got my car back it was then updated.

CarPlay was good, but I did have issues, the main one was that there was an issue where the location of the car was reported to be over a hundred miles to the east. Too often, I would be trying to find how to get somewhere and CarPlay would have me in a completely different location or even in the sea. Never really got to the bottom of the issue, but I think it was a phone issue and incompatibility with the car GPS system.

Another ongoing issue was CarPlay crashing, which meant the screen froze. The only solution was to disconnect the phone from the car and reconnect. Of course it usually did this at the worse possible times, usually as I was about to arrive somewhere and directions from Waze was critical.

I occasionally had range anxiety with the Funky Cat, coming back from Dover once with closures of the M25 and the M4 I was down at one point to 1% charge as I approached Membury services in the middle of the night. Most of the time, well virtually all the time, I did plan journeys so I was never going to go below 20% if I could help it. With the short range of the Funky Cat though, this often meant charging a number of times when making a journey. I did have one issue with this, in my early travels with the Funky Cat, I was coming back from York and had planned to stop at Tamworth Services, but the charger was in use, the chargers at Hopwood were also in use. In the end I went to a BP Pulse charger at a pub in Alvechurch.

One feature of my old Peugeot 208 I liked was the speed limiter, which stopped the car exceeding a set limit, ideal for Bristol with the 20mph zones across the city. The Funky Cat never had that feature, so was quite easy to exceed the speed limit if you weren’t careful.

Initially I was annoyed by all the safety features of the Funky Cat, especially some of the verbal warnings. In the end rather than keep turning them off, they reset after every trip. I decided I would try and drive without setting them off. Managed to do that quite well. Some were annoying though, when the sun was shining through the front windscreen the car would often tell me to concentrate on driving.

One verbal alert though did surprise me.

Please smoke in moderation and drive carefully.

One, I don’t smoke.

Two, I don’t intend to start smoking.

I did however turn off the lane keeping system when travelling on country roads, as they system couldn’t cope. Ideal for the motorway and A roads, however driving through roads in Dorset and Devon, it would continually beep and tug at the steering wheel.

Things I thought might be an issue, as I mentioned, I did take the Funky Cat to France twice, once for a day trip to Dunkerque and once on a holiday to France and Belgium.

Both times I had no issues with travelling in France. I didn’t charge on my day trip, however on the holiday I did charge in both France and Belgium without any issues.

So, good bye Ora it has been fun.

The Funky Cat has left the building!

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I (still) miss Jaiku

“Jaiku forever” by Ade Oshineye, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There was a Threads discussion on what was the first social network you were part of. I didn’t participate, but it did get me thinking about my own social network history.

My first experience of an “online” social network was back in the late 1980s when I was at University. A friend of my created something akin to a social network that ran on the VAX system the university had. It was constrained to the university network so could only be accessed whilst on campus.

It was then nearly ten years later, when I went online, that I discovered and used Usenet.

Usenet was (and is) a global, decentralised network of discussion boards called newsgroups. At the time it was very much about discussion, today more about file sharing.

Back then, when you had dial up internet (and was charged per minute) what I did was go online, synchronise my newsgroups, go offline, read and reply, and then go back online and synchronise.

Over the next ten years, that was my primary means for social networking. I did some blogging and using wikis, however what the changed was the launch of micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku.

I joined Twitter in March 2007 (and quit in September 2023). I also joined Jaiku.

Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and life streaming  service, from Finland, comparable to Twitter, founded a month before Twitter.

Where Jaiku won out for many (in the UK) was that you could use SMS to send and receive messages. If you were in the US you could do that with Twitter, but it was restricted to the US. I also liked the threaded discussions, something that wasn’t available in Twitter for years.

As with many things, Jaiku was bought out by the Google, and closed to sign ups. This did kill Jaiku as you couldn’t build your community, and sustaining was hard, as people would leave to go elsewhere as that was where the community was.

Since then we’ve had Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google+, and others, we now have Bluesky, Threads, and the hell that is LinkedIn.

Of course Twitter is for all intents and purposes dead, and though I like Bluesky, I think the insights, joy and experience that I had with Jaiku (and the early days of Twitter) have probably gone for ever.

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Charging at Charlecote Park

I was on my way back from Birmingham and I had time, so stopped to visit Charlecote Park, a country house set in rural parkland near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.

As with many National Trust properties they have EV chargers available. I plugged the Funky Cat in and let it charge. I went to explore the house and grounds, and have a cup of tea, well an iced coffee, it was a hot day!

When I arrived no one was using the EV chargers, it was a weekday, but even so the car park was quite busy. With EV ownership is on the rise, I wonder why more people don’t take advantage of the charger, it might be the cost, as 60p kWh though cheaper than some, is on the high side for fast 11-22 kWh chargers.

Charging pricing is so varied, but I am guessing part of people not taking advantage of the EV chargers, is people charging (for less) at home. I rarely charge at home and don’t (yet) have an EV charging point installed. My main reason for having one installed is less about saving money, but more for convenience.

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Keep in low gear

So, the other day I was driving down Porlock Hill in Somerset which is rather steep (20%). As you approach the hill there are some warning signs, one said Try your brakes, fine I can do that. The other said Keep in low gear.

However I was driving down in my EV and realised I really didn’t know what this means when driving an EV. 

The Highway Code isn’t much help, rule 160 says

select a lower gear before you reach a long downhill slope. This will help to control your speed

The key with travelling in a lower gear, is that engine braking will help slow the car and control the speed.

So, I know that but an EV doesn’t have a clutch or a gearbox as a petrol engine car has.

I guessed that the regenerative braking (which I have always in strong mode) would do what engine braking did. I do wonder though what would happen if you were at 100% or close to it without regenerative braking, I am guessing then the brakes would have to do all the work, more than they would usually do.

In the end the regenerative braking worked wonders, but even so….

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Charging at Arlington Court

Arlington Court

I was visiting Arlington Court in Devon. It took me a while to find the EV chargers, literally drove around the entire car park before I found them. These were the same Chargepoint EV chargers available at other National Trust properties. A simple matter then of plugging in the Funky Cat and using contactless to authenticate and authorise payment. Chargepoint take a hold of £15 which is a lot less than other providers who, from my experience, can sometimes place a hold of £50 on your bank account.

I then left the car to charge and went to enjoy exploring Arlington Court.

When you read social media threads about EVs, often a criticism made about EVs is the time it takes to charge. I often think that criticism is misplaced as people are thinking that charging an EV is like filling a car with petrol. Though there are EV charging stations on major roads and at motorway services, you can often find EV chargers in many other places such as hotels, car parks, theme parks, shopping centres, designer outlets, and National Trust properties.

So, yes you can stop on your journey to charge, but you can also charge when you reach your destination. So, no surprise when visiting Arlington Court in Devon that there were EV chargers available to charge the Funky Cat. I arrived, I charged, I enjoyed my visit, and the Funky Cat was at 100% when I was ready to leave.

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Only 160 miles

Recently charged the Funky Cat to 100% and the predicted range was down to 160 miles.

Lately I have been getting 170 miles when charging. As with all figures like this for the Funky Cat, the predicted range is based on previous driving, and I have (in the main) been commuting to work which includes a section of motorway and a few hills. I also have been using the air conditioning as well.

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MFG to get cheaper for the summer

One of the annoying aspects of owning an electric vehicle is the high cost of rapid charging (more than 50kWh) at charging locations and motorway services.

When I first got the Funky Cat, there were MFG chargers at my local garage, however, it was still a few months until they went live. They were expensive at 79p per kWh, so they were usually my charger of last resort.

However I saw today, in an email,  that for the next three months, they are reducing their prices to 59p per kWh.

From 1 July to 30 September 2026, you can charge for just 59p per kWh at every UK EV Power location – down from 79p per kWh. That’s a saving of 25%, or around £6 on a typical charge.

This makes them comparable to the peak cost of Tesla chargers. This is also a lot cheaper than the cost of the InstaVolt chargers, which I also use, which are now 92p. Hopefully we might see a little more competition in charging pricing.

This 59p price from MFG is available not just with the MFG app, but also with standard contactless payment, which is a bonus.

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Still fixed

I did the fix for my malfunctioning Ora Funky Cat app the other day and today the app is working as expected, reporting on the current charge and predicted range of the Funky Cat. I will keep an eye on it even so.

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Fix for the malfunctioning ORA Funky Cat app

I wrote earlier about an issue I was having with the Ora app.

When I put the Funky Cat on charge this week, the app was showing no change to the charge. Checking the actual car, I could see it was charging. 

Since then I have been unable to see the real charge of the Funky Cat through the app.

I wasn’t alone and on various forums others were having the same problem.

However, there is a possible solution.

Use the app to unlock the car, then refresh the app interface and check whether the data is synchronised. 

If this is the case and it is synchronised then the app now should be working correctly.

I tried this method and it worked for me (and has for others).