Leapmotor C10 review

Let’s start with the good stuff. Broadly speaking the C10 is comfortable: it recovers from ruts and bumps pretty well and when the roads are forgiving it coasts along happily. You don’t end up thinking ‘yup, this is another cheap knock-off’ five minutes after getting in, so that’s a solid base to work from.

As we mentioned in the Overview, acceleration is extremely smooth and the pedal response is consistent, so you don’t have to fight to get the car to do what you want. Too many manufacturers overlook that these days. The regen has a few levels to it, so you can pick whatever feels most natural.

And the bad stuff?

Dynamically the C10 is pretty limited. In corners the body leans a lot and without much sense of control. The steering is heavily assisted and so feels light and numb, and you have to work to unwind the lock out of junctions. The brakes can be snatchy at low speed and spongy when you’re going a bit quicker. The ride too tends to be jittery at a crawl. No fun to be had, basically.

We’ve also got some reservations about how it’ll cope in the UK: we get the same setup as cars sold in Europe (Stellantis has tuned the chassis, apparently), and on the few rougher roads we came across on our test route in Italy, there were signs of suspension noise that would seriously undermine the refinement if they were a constant presence. Uh oh. Consider our judgement withheld until we’ve driven one on home soil.

Anything else?

Yeah, Leapmotor makes a big deal about how quiet the C10 is and generally it’s very hushed. The two exceptions are below 20mph where the augmented low-speed sound whirrs away (presumably you can turn this off, though we didn’t find the screen for it) and at motorway speed, where the buffeting off the wing mirrors really picks up.

Drive, neutral, reverse and park are all selected using a stalk behind the wheel.

Does the range hold up?

260 miles is the claim, suggesting efficiency of 3.7mi/kWh on the combined cycle. This is precisely the figure we hit over a 50-mile drive, although this was mostly through towns and villages on a mild day. With more representative high-speed running (and in a colder climate) we’d expect those numbers to come down. More as we have it.