Leapmotor T03 review

It looks exactly like you’d expect a cheap car to look: very simple design, lots of plasticky materials. So you’re not going to be wowed by the quality, but that was never on the table.

The big win is that everything seems to be screwed on properly, and there are no tell-tale rattles that make you start to wonder about the Euro NCAP score (Leapmotor doesn’t know when it’ll be tested yet, but points confidently towards the ADAS, six airbags and the car’s anti-collision beam).

The seats are comfortable and supportive enough for city driving. Visibility is decent. The driving position is upright as you’d expect, and while the wheel adjusts for height the reach is locked in position. So it might suit you, it might not.

Talk screenage to me.

You get an eight-inch instrument display directly behind the wheel, which shows you your speed, any warning messages, remaining range (though no battery percentage, annoyingly), time, temperature… and not a great deal else. You can’t knock Leapmotor for keeping it simple, but the layout could make better use of the space.

Then there’s the 10.1in central touchscreen, which has a row of icons along the bottom: home takes you to the main screen for your radio, nav etcetera, then a car icon brings up all the vehicle controls; everything from lights to driver assistance. This is laid out Tesla-style, though everything’s a little small to use easily on the move. Maybe that’s why Leapmotor makes you stop for some of them to work?

Then there’s shortcuts for the front and rear windscreen demist, climate control, a boot open button and a tab for media volume. There’s only so much you can expect for a car this affordable, but at least the Dacia Spring reserves a few buttons for the key functions. It also pulls off a better interface too.

Unfortunately, like in the C10 SUV, the native nav is a bit laggy and isn’t terribly clear either. Leapmotor says it prides itself on being able to turn around over-the-air updates in weeks: it can't replace this interface soon enough, frankly.

No Apple CarPlay or Android Auto either, so you can’t bypass it with Google Maps or Waze. Hmm. Maybe it’s time to dig out that old phone mount…

How’s the headroom?

Pretty good. Even six-footers shouldn’t be getting too close and personal with the headliner in here (unless you’ve got a particularly big barnet, we suppose), and while it’s less capacious in the back it’s still roomy for a car of this size. Foot room is pretty marginal, so you’ll want whoever’s ahead of you to jack their seat up by an inch or two to give your toes some breathing space. The T03 is a four-seater; no getting three abreast in the back.

Boot space amounts to 208 litres, well down on what you get in a Spring. And there’s not much space between the seatbacks and the bootlid, so that capacity comes from its depth. You’ll get a few bags of shopping in here, but not much else.

The T03 isn’t blessed with many storage spaces inside: there’s a central bin-slash-flask-holder up front, with a clever cutout to prop up a phone. But other than the door bins, there’s only really pockets to stash bits ‘n’ bobs, and none of the Spring's imaginative solutions.