Leapmotor was a relative unknown among the mass of new Chinese EV companies until last October when Stellantis – owner of brands such as Alfa Romeo and Vauxhall - paid €1.5 billion for a 21% stake and to take control of the company’s entire export output.
This week, the two companies announced the start of Leapmotor EV sales in mainland Europe from September and in the UK from March 2025, starting with the T03 city car and C10 mid-sized Volkswagen ID 4 rival. More will follow, eventually giving Leapmotor a range to take on MG.
But just who is Leapmotor and what is the appeal, both to customers and to Stellantis dealers, who might want to take a punt on stocking the range?
The clue to Leapmotor’s origins lie in its address: 451 Internet of Things Street, Hangzhou. The company was founded in 2015 by Jiangming Zhu, an engineer who had previously helped to set up electronics company Dahua Technology.
Dahua is most famous for being sanctioned by the US and UK over its surveillance cameras. However, the company, also located on Internet of Things Street, has a far broader tech range that dovetails neatly into Leapmotor’s own technology, which appears to outstrip that of Stellantis in some areas.
Leapmotor’s first car was the dinky S01, a 4m-long electric coupé launched in 2019 that, it would be fair to say, didn’t exactly set the sales charts alight.
The T03 city car arrived next, in 2020, packing a range of battery sizes in a four-seat car that costs from the equivalent of just £5500 before taxes in China. No price has been set for mainland Europe or the UK, but Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has said it’ll sell a higher-spec car with a 165-mile range for below €20,000. The £14,995 Dacia Spring EV is expected to be a key target.
Leapmotor’s ambitions in China have long since outpaced its initial city car forays and its most recent launches have been much larger SUVs and saloons that sit in the “good but not expensive” category, according to its annual report.
Of those, we’ll get the C10 mid-sized SUV, but Leapmotor CEO Zhu told journalists on Tuesday that it plans to launch more compact models for European and global markets while focusing on bigger cars in China.
Next year, new Netherlands-based joint-venture company Leapmotor International will bring to Europe a compact SUV named A12 as well as another compact vehicle called the A03. Following in 2026 will be small models, one an SUV named T05 and another called T11, Zhu said. The names are likely to change.
The company’s extended-range plug-in hybrid versions of the C10 and possible future vehicles could also be homologated, Tavares said, if attitudes among European policy makers changed to the point where it made the cost of adapting them for Euro 7 emissions standards worthwhile.
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