Leapmotor B10 Review 2025

Leapmotor's third car to come to the UK is entering a hotly contested area of the market, with various other budget options and more expensive rivals to worry about. It's cheap and well equipped, but is that enough to overlook the car's less good elements? Find out in our full Leapmotor B10 review. 

The Leapmotor name isn’t a familiar one in the UK (it’s not actually existed over here for all that long), and you’d think that could be a problem for the new Leapmotor B10. As a compact mid-size SUV, it's entering one of the most crowded, most fiercely fought sectors of the entire car market, and as an all-electric example of the breed, it enters a sub-sector that’s even more fashionable. And in these circumstances, unfamiliar names don’t tend to prosper too well.

Unless, that is, you appeal to buyers’ wallets. Just look at the likes of Jaecoo and Omoda. These are unfamiliar Chinese marques that have had a similarly short existence in the UK market, but that have managed to shift a very impressive amount of cars in a short space of time by pricing their products at a level that undercuts the established competition by thousands rather than hundreds, while also outdoing them on standard equipment. Turns out many British car buyers are absolute suckers for a good deal, and that’s a fact that’s not been lost on Leapmotor.

Think also of MG. This may be a name with heritage in the UK, but the days of the marque’s charming coupes and convertibles are a distant and foggy memory. In the past couple of decades, the brand has had to rebuild itself under Chinese stewardship after some very troubled times, with a range of cheap-and-cheerful hatchbacks and SUVs. And this build-’em-cheap-sell-’em-cheaper approach has guided the resurgent MG brand to impressive success in recent years.

China is the obvious link between these examples, and as another player aiming to compete at a similar end of the market using similar tactics, it may not surprise you to learn that Leapmotor is also of Chinese origin.

Leapmotor was founded in 2015, and until 2024, it only sold cars in its home market. Then, in 2024, Leapmotor International was formed as a joint venture with European manufacturing giant Stellantis (the firm that owns and operates brands like Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Fiat, Jeep, Vauxhall, among others), with Stellantis holding a 51/49 majority stake. The purpose of Leapmotor International is to bring Leapmotor vehicles to other parts of the world outside China using Stellantis’ long-established sales and post-sales network.

The B10 is the company’s third offering in the UK market, following the T03 city car and the larger C10 SUV, and many more models are planned in very short order. And throughout the firm’s ever-expanding portfolio of all-electric cars, that same high-spec-low-price ethos is a constant.

Now, it’s usually true that you don’t get something for nothing in this day and age, and where prices are so low and equipment is so high, you can usually expect sacrifices to be made in other areas. That’s certainly true with the Leapmotor B10, as we'll explain here. 

Leapmotor B10: Range and charging times

The B10 has an LFP battery pack with a total capacity of 67.1kWh, while the usable capacity figure is 65kWh. According to WLTP figures, a full charge will take you up to 270 miles on average. That figure is broadly similar to those of most key rivals.

As ever, though, you should be healthily sceptical about the official figure. In the real world, bank on getting more like 240 miles, even in optimal conditions, and your return will fall further with cold weather or prolonged high-speed motorway runs, neither of which electric cars like.

If you have a 7.4kW home wallbox charger installed, that full charge will take around nine hours. The cable for such a charger is provided by Leapmotor as standard. Unconventionally, Leapmotor also provides a cable to connect to a regular three-pin domestic socket as standard, but we wouldn’t rely on that on a regular basis because a full charge will take more like 24 hours on such a connection. It also might not be great for the health of your home electricity system. 

When you need to charge up quickly on the hop, the B10 can accept a maximum DC rapid charging speed of 168kW. If you can find a powerful enough DC public charger running at sufficient capacity, Leapmotor says a 20-80% top-up will take 20 minutes. Do bear in mind that this will be by far the most expensive way of charging, though.

You can forgive a few dynamic foibles when a car is very cheap, but even when viewed through this type of lens, the Leapmotor B10 is poor in this area. 

The thing you really want in a family car like this is a comfortable ride, and initially, the B10’s super-soft suspension might trick you into thinking you’ve got it, especially when the road is smooth. It lumbers along easily enough, especially on the motorway, where it feels particularly serene, helped in no small part by the car’s excellent all-round refinement.

Chuck a few bumps and potholes into the mix, though, especially at low speed, and you’ll quickly realise that the suspension has so little damping that road imperfections seem to wallop into the underside of the car, giving a crashy and unsettled feel. That poor control also manifests itself in the nose of the car dipping a disproportionate amount when you hit the brakes, and rising when you accelerate. Encounter a speed bump, and it’ll feel like the body of the car is still bouncing up and down halfway up the road, while undulating routes with even minor elevation changes might well have everyone inside feeling decidedly green around the gills.

Unsurprisingly, that loose body control also means that the B10 feels very wallowy in corners, with lots of body roll to be felt even at low-ish speeds. The car also feels very heavy as you change direction, which adds further to its cumbersome and clumsy nature.

The steering doesn’t help the handling, either. It has three modes - Comfort, Standard and Sport - but while you can feel very marginal differences in the weighting if you really concentrate, the various modes make virtually no difference to the driving experience overall. And no matter which mode you select, there’s always a vague, artificial and inconsistent sensation to be felt through the wheel. It doesn’t help that these modes have to be selected through the overly complex touchscreen system, rather than with a physical button, so we really can’t see why you’d bother.

There are also three modes for the car’s regenerative braking system, and again, these have to be selected through the touchscreen rather than with convenient paddles behind the steering wheel, like you find in some rivals. Even the most severe of these delivers a decidedly gentle sensation of regen, feeling like one of the less severe modes in many electric cars. It’s certainly not the one-pedal experience that some EVs offer.

In an effort to keep the buying process simple, the Leapmotor B10 is offered with a single powertrain in the UK. This gives you a 218PS electric motor driving the rear wheels, fed by a 67.1kWh battery. Look at the official stats, and you’ll see that the 0-62mph dash can be dispensed with in eight seconds, and that the car can reach 106mph flat-out.

However, even if those numbers mean anything to you - which they probably don’t - the story on performance is a little more complicated than that. That’s because there are three different modes for the B10's powertrain: Comfort, Standard and Sport.

In Sport mode, the pickup feels eager and brisk, certainly brisk enough that you won’t question the 0-62mph time mentioned a moment ago. The level of acceleration tails off more the faster you go, but that’s the case in most similarly powered EVs.

Dial things back to Standard mode, and you’ll notice a distinct backing off of the acceleration level on offer, but there will still be more than enough urgency on hand to deal with the vast majority of driving situations. Select Comfort mode, and predictably, the urgency is reined in still further. Accelerator inputs are reacted to a lot more slowly, and acceleration is served up quite a lot less readily.

This mode is fine in low-speed urban environments, but for anything quicker, one of the other modes will be needed. Unfortunately, switching between the modes is a pain because - like with most of the B10’s various functions - it involves trawling through various menus and submenus on the touchscreen.

The Leapmotor B10’s generous standard equipment list includes no fewer than 17 automatic driver assistance functions. These include adaptive cruise control with traffic jam assist, front collision warning with automatic emergency braking, rear collision warning, rear cross traffic alert and braking, blind spot detection with door opening warning, lane departure warning, lane keep assist, intelligent speed limit assist, driver drowsiness alert, and multi collision assist. 

Unfortunately, many of these systems are far too oversensitive, and issue you with a cacophony of constant bings and bongs that are at best annoying, and at worst, infuriating. Ironically, you might even get so annoyed with it all that you find yourself wanting to drive the car into a wall, just to shut it up.

Yes, you can switch these systems off, but doing so with the over-complicated touchscreen system is both difficult and time-consuming, and distracting enough that it certainly shouldn’t be done while driving along. What’s more, the systems are automatically reinstated once you turn the car off and turn it on again, so you’ll have to go through this process each and every time you drive the car.

If you do find yourself having an accident, there are seven airbags to help keep those inside from harm, along with two Isofix child seat mounting points on the rear bench. The car hasn’t been pummelled into a concrete block by Euro NCAP yet, but Leapmotor is promising a five-star score when that happens, as was the case for the smaller C10. 

We’ve seen no data from Leapmotor itself on permissible towing weights. Data from other online sources suggests a towing limit of 750kg regardless of whether your trailer is braked or not, which isn’t impossible to believe, as many EVs have curiously low towing figures.

The Leapmotor B10 has exterior dimensions of 4,515mm in length, 1,885mm in width and 1,655mm in height, with a wheelbase of 2,735mm. It’s not a massive thing, then, but it is one of those cars that looks quite a lot bigger than it actually is from the outside. And happily, that generous perceived size translates to the interior, too.

The front seats have lots of space, as they do in pretty much all cars these days, but things feel especially airy thanks to the standard panoramic roof above your head, and the floating centre console that gives a pleasant open-plan feel. You also have lots of storage on hand for keeping the cabin tidy.

Things aren’t perfect up front, mind: the thick body pillars on either side of the rear window result in poor rear visibility, and the manual steering column adjustment doesn’t have a huge range of movement. However, the standard power-adjusting front seats mean you should be able to easily and accurately find a comfortable driving position.

Those in the rear seats are very well catered for, too: there’s a huge amount of legroom for a pair of tall passengers, even if those up front are similarly gangly, and headroom is also very generous despite that panoramic roof. There’s enough shoulder space for a third passenger to squeeze in for shorter journeys, and a totally flat rear footwell gives everybody on the rear bench more foot space.

The boot is adequate at 430 litres, but it’s also true that many rivals do better for capacity, some considerably so. You’ll appreciate the square-sided shape of the space, though, plus the load lip and the deep underfloor storage compartment. You don’t have to reserve this for the storage of your charging cables, either, because there’s also a 25-litre ‘frunk’ under the bonnet. 

For those times when you need maximum cargo space, the rear seats fold down in a 60/40 split to give a total of 1700 litres of load volume. The backrests of those seats go almost flat, and they lie pretty much flush with the false boot floor, leaving you with a usefully level load area.

This is an area in which the Leapmotor B10 might disappoint you. Almost all of the surfaces that comprise the interior are fashioned from hard-to-the-touch grey plastic, many of which have a cheap-looking shiny or grainy finish. This shortage of lustre and tactility means that the B10 is certainly not a posh-feeling environment.

You may consider that to be expected given the car’s budget status, and it wouldn’t be an issue if all the B10’s rivals were the same. However, rivals from MG, Jaecoo and Omoda that can be had for a similar price feel a lot more pleasant inside.

Leapmotor believes that the B10’s razzle-dazzle infotainment system is a big part of its appeal. It’s built around a massive 14.6-inch central touchscreen, and the system is equipped with all the functionality you expect, including Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, navigation, 4G wifi,  a wireless phone charging pad, and 12-speaker premium audio. You also have an 8.8-inch digital instrument panel behind the steering wheel.

Once your eyes have taken in the impressive-looking central screen and wander elsewhere, however, you’ll notice that the B10’s interior has no buttons or switches, except for electric window switches on the doors, a couple of buttons in the ceiling (for the hazard lights and the emergency call system) and a handful of controls on the steering wheel (one of these locks and unlocks the doors strangely). And that causes one or two problems.

Other than the functions just mentioned, literally everything else has to be operated - at least in part - by the touchscreen. That includes properly basic stuff like adjusting the angle of your door mirrors and adjusting the speed and sensitivity of your intermittent windscreen wiper setting.

This gives a double-whammy of ergonomic issues. Firstly, it makes the system way too complicated to use, due to the inevitable complexity of the menu structure needed to facilitate all that functionality. You might learn where to find major functions over time, but you’ll keep hitting dead ends when looking for lesser-used ones.

Secondly, touchscreens are - by their very nature - more distracting to use when driving than physical buttons and switches, and for a variety of reasons: unlike physical controls, on-screen icons move around so you don’t automatically know where they are, and you can’t locate them by feeling with your fingertips, meaning you have to concentrate a lot more in finding them and hitting them. All of this diverts too much of your attention away from the road when performing even basic functions.

Various functions - such as locking and unlocking the doors, opening the powered tailgate, presetting the cabin temperature and checking your battery level - can also be controlled remotely through a smartphone app. This actually works pretty well: touchscreen tech is fine on smartphones, just not when you’re not driving a car.

The price of the Leapmotor B10 depends on how it’s bought. If you’re a company car driver, the price is around £31,500 for the single high-spec version available. Of course, you as a company car driver don’t pay that price: instead, that’s the price that your monthly Benefit-in-Kind company car tax bills are based on, and these are calculated using a percentage of the car’s price. And the good news is that because the B10 is an EV, this percentage is very small indeed (currently 3%) compared to the ones for a petrol or diesel car, and will be for some time yet. That’ll save company car drivers thousands over the period of your average company car contract.

Retail buyers pay a bit less. This is all thanks to the £1,500 Leap-Grant, which is a self-funded discount launched by Leapmotor in response to the Government’s Electric Car Grant, announced in 2025, for which Chinese brands don’t qualify. This drops the retail price to around £30,000. 

But crucially, especially given how central affordability is to the car’s appeal, how do those prices compare with those of competitors? Well, that’s a little complicated, so do bear with us.

The fact is that both the Jaecoo E5 and Omoda E5 have lower starting prices than the B10, but that’s because they’re both offered in a lower-spec trim level, while the Leapmotor isn’t. Specify the top-spec versions of each, which are comparable on equipment to the Leapmotor, and both cars become more expensive than the B10: the Jaecoo to the tune of around £300, the Omoda to the tune of around £3,000. As well as being comparable with the B10 on equipment, these versions are also comparable on range, power, and performance, but they are a teeny bit smaller.

We can see the B10’s other big rivals being the MG S5 EV. Again, this has a lower starting price, but that’s for an entry-level version that’s down on power, battery size and range, not to mention equipment. Once you’ve specced it up to a level that’s comparable on all fronts, then it becomes almost £4,000 more expensive.

So, the thing to remember here is that if maximum kit levels are your priority, then the Leapmotor has a price edge over its rivals. If, however, you’re prepared to live with a little bit less - but a still entirely acceptable amount of - equipment in order to get a lower purchase price, then the tables are turned.

Assuming that your domestic power is charged at the UK’s national average rate (around 28p/kWh), a full charge of your Leapmotor B10’s battery will cost you around £18 if you charge it at home. That’s regardless of whether you charge it on a 7.4kW home wallbox charger of a regular three-pin domestic socket.

However, the smart thing to do would be to charge overnight on heavily discounted off-peak power, if your tariff has that feature. Do so, and you’ll likely pay less than half that. Some providers even offer free electricity periods, for instance, when windy weather has resulted in a surplus of renewably generated energy. 

Avoid using DC public rapid chargers unless it’s a proper emergency. It’s not uncommon to see prices of 90p/kWh on charging stations like this, and at that kind of cost, running a B10 won’t be much cheaper than running a petrol or diesel car.

The one version of the Leapmotor B10 falls into insurance group 32 (of 50), meaning that premiums will probably be on the pricier side of middling. Until April 2025, EVs like the Leapmotor B10 were exempt from VED road tax, but those days are no more, so you’ll be liable for the same £195 flat rate as drivers of combustion-engined cars. At least the car’s low price means you won’t be troubled by the expensive luxury car surcharge on VED.

The Leapmotor B10 is offered in one single high-spec trim level. It doesn’t have a name as such: it’s just called the Leapmotor B10. And high-spec it most assuredly is, because Leapmotor takes an ‘everything as standard’ approach to its cars, even though they’re comparatively low in cost. That’s pretty much the brand’s whole schtick, in fact.

And a result, standard kit includes:

• 18-inch alloy wheels
• LED headlamps with automatic high beam
• Panoramic roof
• Rear privacy glass
• Rain-sensing wipers
• Rear parking sensors
• 360-degree cameras
• Smartphone keyless entry
• Powered tailgate
• 14.6-inch touchscreen infotainment
• Leather-effect upholstery
• Heated and ventilated front seats with power adjustment
• Heated steering wheel
• Climate control air-conditioning
• 64-colour ambient lighting
• Heat pump
• Adaptive cruise control
• Vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging functionality

The only optional extra available is exterior paint. If you’re not enamoured with the standard colour, called Starry Night Blue metallic (Leapmotor tells us this was inspired by the painting ‘Starry Night Over the Rhone’ by Vincent Van Gogh) then there are five others to choose from.