Leapmotor C10 review

We’re going to struggle to pad this out: it’s £36,500 and your only choices are which paint to have. Leapmotor is offering £399 monthly repayments on a four-year lease deal with a £399 down payment.

Standard colour is green. Your other options, all costing £700, are black, white, grey and grey again (but different).

To give you some perspective, around £30k will see you into an MG ZS EV, £33k into an Omoda E5, and £37.5k a BYD Atto 3. That’s its compatriots covered off. For stuff you might actually aspire to own, you’re looking at £37.5k for a Renault Scenic, £40k for a Hyundai Ioniq 5, Nissan Ariya and Skoda Enyaq, or £45k for a Kia EV6. All more money, all more car.

But this gets all the kit, right?

Yep: there’s an enormous amount of kit, which we’ll rattle through quickly. It rides on 20s as standard, and gets auto LEDs, roof bars (that’ll shoulder up to 100kg) and rear privacy glass.

Inside the 10.25in display and 14.6in screen (the latter in 2.5k resolution) are also included, as well as a wireless charging pad, four USB ports, a 12-speaker, 840W surround sound system (sounded pretty good when we tried it), dual-zone auto air con, synthetic leather seats (six- and four-way adjustment up front, as well as being heated and ventilated) and steering wheel, that panoramic sunroof and ambient lighting.

There’s also a rear parking sensor and 360-degree view camera, heat pump, vehicle to load (V2L) bi-directional charging, allowing you to power external devices from the car’s battery, plus a tonne of ADAS features. As discussed, not all of these are particularly well integrated.

Anything else we should know?

Instead of a key, you get a credit card-style, er, card, that has to be placed in a specific spot on the centre console to turn the car on. You open and lock the C10 by tapping said card against the wing mirror, or by using the smartphone app. Novel.

It also gets a five-star Euro NCAP crash safety rating, while towing capacity amounts to 1,500kg. Of course, towing anything will deplete the range drastically.

Standard warranty is four years; well short of the seven you get with Kia. But Leapmotor reckons most customers will be lease buyers on its four-year deal, so they won’t need more.