2024 Leapmotor C10 review: International first drive

While some European brands struggle with the surge of affordable and talented Chinese electric cars into their core markets, car-making giant Stellantis decided instead to join them, taking a controlling stake in EV brand Leapmotor and forming a joint venture to sell their cars abroad.

The C10 is a mid-size electric SUV and one of two Leapmotor products they’re bringing to Australia later this year, the other being the T03 supermini. So ahead of the launch, we tried one out to see if ‘affordable’ is merely a byword for cheap, or if there’s more substance behind it.

Leapmotor currently offers five cars in China, three of which are SUVs, with the C10 being the smallest and most recent of the trio.

Visually almost identical to the larger C16, to these eyes it’s not exactly the most exciting car to look at. Its fairly muted styling features a bulbous front end, sizeable front overhang, and wheels that, even at 20 inches, somehow look a little too small for the body. But it’s inoffensive enough and a multiple design award winner, so there.

Rather more key to its success will be the price, the cabin, and the drivetrain, which for us will be fully electric – there’s also an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) in China.

Australian prices haven’t yet been announced, but in China the C10 retails between $27,000 and $35,500, suggesting that even with a hefty import mark-up, it’ll be priced very competitively here. Potentially even enough to steal sales from smaller petrol-powered rivals, and even the BYD Atto 3 EV.

In a word, cavernous. Externally it’s about the same size as a Mercedes-Benz GLC or the incoming XPeng G6, but the interior certainly feels far larger than both. Particularly in the second row, where head, knee and leg room can almost be measured in acres, and aided further by a manually reclining backrest.

It’s really rather comfortable too, the large, squidgy seats offering plenty of thigh support in both rows, and full-height side bolsters seemingly embracing your entire torso. Our test car featured the optional Oeko-Tex-certified silicone leather, which feels remarkably soft and will be of interest to parents of children with sensitive skin.

A couple of other valuable features for parents include the 2.1m² panoramic roof with electric sunblind built-in, and the nifty flat surface in the rear armrest upon which you can stick suction bowls for babies.

Aside from that, the well-built cabin very much echoes the minimalist approach of a Tesla and features plenty of soft-touch materials, ambient lighting, four cupholders, a truly awful 15W wireless charger, and a 12-speaker sound system. The main event, however, is the 14.6-inch, 2.5K infotainment system, and it’s a bit of a highlight.

Running the latest Snapdragon 8295 chip and Leapmotor’s own operating system, it’s bright, quick, and really easy to navigate for the most part with the majority of your primary functions accessible on the front page. It should come stuffed with all the usual apps too, but we’ll have to wait and see on that.

There are also heated and ventilated front seats and a heated steering wheel, all options in the Chinese market, as well as a vehicle-to-load (V2L) function for powering external devices, while the passive safety offering consists of front, side, and curtain airbags for added safety. Leapmotor states the car should achieve five stars in Euro NCAP, but it hasn’t been tested yet. 

An electronic tailgate reveals 370 litres of storage space in the boot, expandable to 825L with the rear seats folded down. That’s quite a bit less than an Atto 3, which suggests more space has been reserved for the cabin. There’s also no front storage available, even on the fully-electric version, and the lidar on our car won’t be available in Australia.

All versions of the C10 come with a 170kW motor on the rear axle producing 320Nm of torque, so it’s not exactly rapid, but it’ll comfortably out-drag pretty much any petrol-powered alternative to 100km/h, and pip the Atto 3, taking just 7.29 seconds.

That’s about as exciting as it gets for the C10, with super-light steering meaning this is more of a suburban family mover than anything else. But it certainly excels at that, with a notably tight turning radius making navigating tight car parks or crowded streets an absolute doddle. It also offers self-parking and remote parking on higher-tier models.

The suspension can feel a little hard at times, with larger bumps in particular drawing a stiff reaction from the suspension. But it does help to keep the car stable enough when cornering, minimising body roll for the most part. Unless you live down a farm track, you’ll likely be quite satisfied with how it rides on normal roads.

Being fully electric, there’s barely a whisper of noise from the motor, but road noise can intrude a bit on coarse surfaces with dual-layer glazing limited only to the windshield.

It’s expected that we’ll get the larger of the two batteries, that being a 69.9kWh lithium ferrophosphate (LFP) unit offering up to 420km of range on the WLTP cycle, which equals the top end of the Atto 3’s claimed range. Our combined-cycle driving achieved over 95 per cent of that stated amount after more than 200km, meaning it should be fairly accurate.

There’s no mention of charging power from Leapmotor, but it does state a 30–80 per cent DC charge will take 30 minutes, with AC charging taking just over six hours.

Much will depend on just how competitive the C10 is on price when it lands, but assuming it comes in around the $50,000 mark, it will undoubtedly draw a few glances away from the myriad of smaller petrol-powered SUVs in and around that price point, and might even make the bosses at BYD and MG a little uncomfortable too.

It’s far from being the most exciting or interesting car in this class, but that nippy EV drivetrain, enormous comfy cabin, high-quality infotainment system, and impressive spec list make up for much of what the C10 lacks in charisma. With little in the way of electric competition at this end of the market, the C10 may just be right in the sweet spot.