Leapmotor T03 2024 review: Chinese electric car is cheap but is it good value?
Not a leap forward for the electric car world
When the name “Leapmotor” first appeared in our email inbox, it was accompanied by a small pang of dread. Here, we assumed, was another Chinese electric car maker that would disappoint its British customers with a questionable human rights record, suspiciously-low prices and tacky plastics, while simultaneously disappointing its Chinese owners with a lack of market penetration and an even greater lack of sales.
And while Leapmotor is indeed a Chinese manufacturer looking to conquer Europe by building electric vehicles and selling them at knockdown prices, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Since last October Leapmotor has been one-fifth owned by Franco-Italian conglomerate Stellantis.
That means Leapmotor is coming to Europe this year in the same family as Peugeot, Citroen and Fiat, and it can claim Europeanness in that the T03 is set to be built in Poland, at Stellantis’s Tychy. This also means it will avoid new EU tariffs on Chinese cars, and that will help keep the cost down for buyers.
So Leapmotor has a grounding in Europe and the T03 is arguably a pretty good way for the brand to introduce itself. A compact electric hatchback with remarkably similar dimensions to the now-defunct Volkswagen e-Up!, this is one of the cheapest electric cars you can buy in the UK. And that puts it right in the firing line of another new boy in the class: the Dacia Spring.
On the face of it, the Dacia is the cheaper of the two — in its cheapest form it costs £1,000 less than the £15,995 Leapmotor — and it has a bigger boot and a bigger footprint. It’s also better looking, at least to our eyes.
The Spring is hardly the prettiest car on the market but despite its narrow body and even narrower wheels, there’s something familiar yet modern about the design. Dacia has even imbued it with a sense of faux sportiness and ruggedness that’s completely erroneous yet somehow still works.
The T03, on the other hand, doesn’t look like that. While it may have the same footprint as a VW Up!, it looks like a Renault Twingo knock-off you might find on Wish, with its stubby nose and smiling face. But the lights look like they’re straight from a shrunken Fiat 500L, which was possibly the ugliest 500-related car ever to leave a Fiat showroom. In short, the T03 is not a pretty thing.
Thankfully, the interior is way more attractive. Normally, cheap cars would be fitted with the sort of plastics that would make wheelie bins turn away in disgust, but while the plastic surfaces in the Leapmotor are quite hard, they’re textured and surprisingly tactile. It feels way more upmarket than you might expect, and the level of standard equipment is impressive.
A digital instrument cluster, a touchscreen, reversing camera and air conditioning all come as standard, along with loads of safety kit and alloy wheels.
The technology is quite impressive, too, albeit in a budget kind of way. The screens are both sharp and relatively easy to navigate, and though the navigation system is irritating — it tells you to drive carefully whenever there’s a small bend in the road — and the driver monitoring camera is always monitoring your face for the first sign of tiredness (which may not sit well with those suspicious of the Chinese state), the systems tend to work well. And it’s easy enough to turn them off if you so wish.
So, there’s no need to upgrade the base model, which is a good thing, because there’s only one trim level available. In fact, the only options available to T03 customers will be the paint colour.
The only real sticking point in the cabin is the amount of space on offer. Chinese car makers seem to prioritise rear cabin space over boot capacity, for some reason, so while the T03 has five doors and just about enough room to seat four adults in relative comfort, the boot is cramped. So cramped, in fact, that a couple of rucksacks is pretty much all you’ll manage to squeeze in there. It’s fine for commuting or the school run but your weekly shop will have to be carried inside the cabin, too.
Mind you, it’s not a car that is best suited to long trips. With a battery capacity of 37.3kWh battery — barely bigger than the one inside the Porsche Cayenne plug-in hybrid — range is limited at best. Officially, it’ll cover 165 miles on a charge, and though you will probably manage that around town if you aren’t greedy with the sporty driving mode or the air conditioning, you won’t get that on the motorway. Or in cold weather, which isn’t the friend of battery chemistry.
And despite the titchy battery, the T03 takes quite a while to charge. At its fastest speed and using a public rapid charger, it can be topped up from 30 to 80 per cent in 36 minutes, which is a bit sluggish given the short distance that enables. And while you should be able to charge that battery from empty to full overnight using a domestic “wallbox” charger, this is very much not a car designed for long-distance touring.
And that is borne out in the way the T03 drives. The car has three different modes for the steering and another three for the throttle response, but none of them make that much difference to the basics.
The steering is pretty numb no matter what, but we learnt to keep it in Sport mode all the time because otherwise it feels as though the steering wheel isn’t attached to anything at all. And though that tall body is quite well controlled and there’s a surprising amount of grip from those skinny tyres, the T03 doesn’t really want to be thrown around too much.
It’s much happier nipping around town, where the compact size, impressive manoeuvrability and low speed zip of the 94bhp electric motor stand it in good stead. It may not feel that fast in the most economical mode and the stats may not highlight the speed very well, but in town, it’s getting from 0-30mph that matters, and the T03 is fairly good at that.
It’s got a relatively comfortable ride, too, with more absorbency than most city cars over any kind of bump, and while it’s better over speed bumps than it is on potholes, the T03 is still one of the best in its class for suspension pliancy. On the motorway it’s acceptable, too, although the refinement and small battery size mean you really can’t spend much time there.
But the T03 needs to be considered in relation to the Dacia Spring, and worryingly for the Romanian brand, the Chinese usurper wins in most areas. It may not be cheaper than a base-model Spring, but it is cheaper than a top-of-the-range version, and that’s a more comparable product in terms of range and performance. The Dacia simply can’t beat the Leapmotor T03’s offering in these areas.
So it’s far from perfect, and will only make sense for those with the lowest budgets, but if you just use it for bustling around town the T03’s price, specification and interior make it exceptional value. In fact, for less than £16,000, it could be considered a bargain.
Chinese car makers
Leapmotor is a Chinese brand headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and has a strategic partnership to jointly develop electric vehicles with the state-owned FAW group, one of China’s “Big Four” car manufacturers. Stellantis acquired a 20 per cent stake in Leapmotor in October 2023, forming a joint venture that enables the distribution and production of Leapmotor cars in global markets outside China. Through this, the Leapmotor T03 city is assembled at the Stellantis Poland plant in Tychy, meaning it can avoid EU tariffs on Chinese imported cars.
Buyers ought to be aware that Chinese car makers have been criticised for receiving an unfair advantage through WTO rule-breaking state support, from a political regime that Amnesty International reports carries out torture, genocide and routine suppression of dissent.
Related articles
- If you found our review of the Leapmotor T03 interesting, check out our review of the T03’s biggest rival, the Dacia Spring
- And you might like to read our review of the Citroën e-C3, which has a 199-mile range for less than £22,000.
- If you’ve got a little more to spend, we can recommend the much cooler, longer-range Renault 5, which still costs less than £30,000.
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