Leapmotor T03: Flop, skip and a jump

It was a great vaudeville comedian of more than a century ago, Will Rogers, who famously said: “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Indeed, he intended it as his own epitaph, and reportedly said he was so pleased with it he couldn’t wait to die to see it carved on his headstone, so to speak. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that, but I’m happy to say that I never met a car I didn’t like because I, too, always try to look for the best in even the most unpromising of designs. That, by the way, may account for my first car, a fragile rear-engined Skoda of the old school. It had few redeeming features, but one was that I could always pass it off as a Saab to people who didn’t know much about cars; plus, sometimes it worked.

The Leapmotor T03 would have tested the good nature of even the late Mr Rogers. It was not a car I could bring myself to like. It is cheap, which is “a good thing”, but it’s simply too compromised to justify considering it as a new car purchase. Its principal rival, the Dacia Spring, another Chinese-produced pure-electric vehicle, is, from my limited acquaintance, actually better than the T03, being more what we’ve a right to expect in a modern car; in any case, the Leapmotor model rules itself out on its own de-merits.

Its origins are interesting. It’s another car made by a Chinese concern you may not have heard of, the Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Limited. It’s a small player, especially by Chinese standards, making about 300,000 units a year, but has a technology-sharing agreement with the much larger First Auto Works, which manufactures 3.3 million cars a year. The reason the T03 (along with some sibling models) is on sale in the UK is that Stellantis owns the rights to make and sell them outside China, in a joint venture. Stellantis, in case you’d not noticed, is the Peugeot-led sprawling group that now controls the Citroen, Fiat, Vauxhall, Opel, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Jeep and other marques.

My guess is that the more fundamental reason why the T03 is on sale at a Stellantis dealer near-ish to you is that the company desperately needs to boost its electric vehicle sales to meet government guidelines and avoid fines. I also surmise that it was in such a hurry that it had neither the time nor the patience to “Europeanise” the car (as, say, Dongfeng/Renault do with the Spring); and had no wish to slap one of its own labels on it, such are the model’s shortcomings. Not even a Citroen badge (despite it being applied to the strange Ami quadricycle, currently available with some heavy discounts to £4,500, by the way).

What’s good about the T03? Well, it’s electric, and therefore clean and economical to run, and well suited to short urban journeys, which is, in fairness, what it’s designed for. An average real-world range of about 130 miles should suit most users (because people still overestimate how often they take a journey longer than that), and it’s perfectly fine to punt around town, and is handily sized for parking (and it has rear cameras and sensors just in case). It’s not bad-looking, and quite reminiscent of the last generation of the Smart ForFour or, going back a bit, the Daewoo/Chevrolet Matiz. It has five doors, a modest boot, and the rear seats are a tight fit for adults. The driving position in this upright design is slightly high, and you sit on rather than in the unyielding nylon fabric, but the seats are quite supportive, missing only an armrest to qualify as comfortable. The rear bench folds down for extra luggage space, and there’s no “split” fold facility, which would be pointless given that you can hardly get one person in the back anyway.

Sadly, this Leapmotor’s vices exceed its few virtues. Most alarmingly, it has no Euro NCAP safety rating, and I doubt it would qualify for an impressive one, despite the suite of now-mandatory warning bleeps. Disappointingly, the rival Dacia Spring only qualifies for one star out of five, but it’s possible the T03 might not stretch to that. It feels flimsy, which I don’t mind, but the fact that it (most likely) is flimsy is less forgivable.

I have to say I also felt short-changed by the lack of reach adjustment in the steering wheel, and, like many cars that try to emulate the Tesla, far too many controls can only be accessed via the touchscreen – which is also detrimental to safety.

Not unrelated, it gets too easily buffeted on the motorway, being a little high and slab-sided, and weighing less than a tonne (virtually unheard of these days). It can certainly keep up with the motorway traffic, but it’s harder work for the driver, and there’s quite a lot of wind noise and whistling once you pass about 50mph. If you are going to test drive one, then you must take it out on the nearest stretch of motorway.

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So that’s the Leapmotor T03, acceptable in town but with too many flaws for the money to make it a sensible buy. Not the Great Leap Forward we might have been wishing for, but it might help Stellantis out of a hole.