Leapmotor B10 review (2025 - 2025)

What is the Leapmotor B10?

The Leapmotor B10 is a mid-size electric SUV from the Chinese brand whose international operation is 51% owned by Stellantis. It's part of a deal aimed to bring Leapmotor vehicles to other parts of the world outside China using Stellantis’ long-established sale- and post-sales network, and Stellantis also acts as a technical consulting partner.

Like a lot of other Chinese entrants to the market in recent months and years, Leapmotor aims to provide as much space, tech and standard equipment as possible in its vehicles, and all for a relatively affordable price. After all, that approach has done MG very well over the past few years, with that brand now knocking on the door of being a top-10 best-seller in the UK these days, and a similar approach has seen rivals like Jaecoo and Omoda shift and awful lot of metal in the UK in a very short space of time.

Where does the B10 fit into this? Well, it's an electric-only family SUV for a price of around £30,000, so in that regard its most direct rivals are arguably the MG S5 EV, Jaecoo E5 and Omoda E5. Within Leapmotor's own range, it sits beneath the larger electric C10 SUV, although it isn’t too far away on price.

If your budget can be stretched a little more, then EV SUVs such as the Hyundai Kona Electric, Kia EV3, BYD Atto 2, Nissan Leaf, Renault Scenic, and Ford Puma Gen-E might also be on your radar. We doubt there’ll be much crossover with the Audi Q4s, BMW iX1s and Tesla Model Ys of the world due to the differences in price and prestige, but even these are a decent fit for size.

So, might you want to buy one? Well, again, that all depends on precisely what you’re after, and perhaps more importantly, what you’re prepared to sacrifice in order to get it.

How practical is it?

At around 4.5 metres long, the Leapmotor B10 is not a huge car, but it looks a lot bigger than it actually is from the outside, and happily, it feels it from the inside, too.

There’s ample front space in pretty much all cars these days, but the B10 feels extra airy up front thanks to its floating centre console, which delivers a decidedly open-plan feel. Less positively, the thick rear window pillars hinder your rear visibility, and the steering column doesn’t have much in the way of manual adjustment, but at least the standard electric seat adjustment is plentiful, and allows you to get comfortable with a bit of playing around. There are lots of storage areas dotted around, too - 22 of them, so says Leapmotor, including cubbies, pockets and cupholders - to keep family clutter stowed away.

If anything, the rear seats are even more impressive for space. There’s masses of space for long legs, even behind a tall driver, and a completely flat floor for generous foot space. Headroom is similarly generous, and the standard panoramic roof makes things feel even more light and airy. It’s a very comfortable place for two tall adults to spend time, and a third will squeeze in for shorter journeys relatively easily. We can’t think of many small SUV rivals that are as roomy for passengers as this.

The boot space isn’t quite so impressive at 430 litres, which is a little average by class standards, but it’ll be enough for many families, and the space is well designed, with a very low loading lip and a large underfloor storage area that allows you to conceal items from sight. You could also keep your charging cables in here if you didn’t want to keep them in the 25-litre ‘frunk’ under the bonnet for some reason.

The rear seats fold down in a 60/40 split to give 1,700 litres of cargo space, and they go almost flat, and lay more or less flush with the boot floor.

As impressive as the B10 is for size and space, though, it’s rather less impressive for interior quality. The majority of the plastics directly in your eyeline have a hard - and sometimes grainy or shiny - finish, meaning that the car’s budget roots are all too obvious. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if all budget electric SUV rivals were the same, but there are plenty - the MG S5 and various products from Omoda and Jaecoo included - that feel quite a bit posher while costing a similar amount.

What’s it like to drive?

One single powertrain is offered in the UK in an effort to keep the buying process simple. This gives you a 215bhp electric motor driving the rear wheels (yes, it’s rear-wheel drive), fed by a 67.1kWh battery. In terms of the official stats, the 0-62mph dash can be seen off in 8.0 seconds, and the top speed is given at 106mph.

Things are a bit more nuanced than that when it comes to performance, though. There are three different modes for the powertrain: Comfort, Standard and Sport. Select Sport, and the pickup feels sprightly and eager, and strong enough to make that 0-62mph time sound utterly plausible. The strength of the pickup tails off a bit the faster you go, but that’s true of most modestly powered electric cars.

Select Standard mode, and there’s a distinct backing-off of the urgency on offer, but the level of performance served up will still be more than adequate for the vast majority of driving situations. Select Comfort, and the urgency is backed off further still. The car becomes a lot slower to respond to accelerator inputs, and the acceleration is unfurled a lot more cautiously. It’s fine for most around-town work, but when you’re doing middling speeds and upwards, you’ll want to select one of the other driving modes. Unfortunately, doing this is a pain because - like with most functions in the B10 - it involves delving into various menus and submenus on the touchscreen.

The powertrain isn’t the only thing with three separate modes. There are also three modes for the regenerative braking system, although again, these have to be selected through the touchscreen rather than with paddles behind the steering wheel, like you find in some rivals. The least severe effectively represents no regen’ at all, so you’ll coast along when you lift off the accelerator, while even the most severe of these delivers a decidedly gentle sensation of regen’, so it’s nowhere near the one-pedal experience you get in some EVs.

There are also three modes for the steering, but although you can feel a very marginal difference to the weighting if you really concentrate, these modes make very little difference to the driving experience as a whole, and there’s always a wooly, artificial quality to the steering no matter which mode you select.

In fact, the handling in general feels quite roly-poly. The car feels heavy and cumbersome as you change direction, and the soft suspension results in pronounced body roll in corners, even at moderate speeds.

This isn’t a problem if it translates into a comfy ride, and in a family SUV like the B10, you’d always favour a comfy ride over handling sharpness anyway. And at motorway speeds, the B10 wafts along very smoothly indeed, and it’s also exceptionally quiet and relaxing in this environment, too. However, on undulating routes with even moderate elevation changes, that soft suspension causes the body to bounce and bob around untidily, and on scruffy low-speed urban surfaces, the suspension can still struggle to deal with bumps and potholes, giving a rather unsettled feel.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

Leapmotor takes an ‘everything as standard’ approach to its cars, and as such, the B10 is offered in one single high-spec trim level. And the equipment level is undeniably generous. Standard fare includes 18-inch alloy wheels, LED headlamps with automatic high beam, rear privacy glass, a panoramic roof, leather-effect upholstery, heated- and ventilated front seats with electric adjustment, heated steering wheel, climate control air-conditioning, smartphone keyless entry, adaptive cruise control, 64-colour ambient lighting, vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging capability, heat pump, rain-sensing wipers, powered tailgate, rear parking sensors, and 360-degree cameras.

Despite having everything as standard, there is one optional extra available: paint. If you don’t want the standard colour, called Starry Night Blue metallic (inspired by the painting ‘Starry Night Over the Rhone’ by Vincent Van Gogh, apparently) then there are five others to choose.

The B10’s infotainment system - standard, of course - is built around a large 14.6-inch central touchscreen, equipped with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, a wireless phone charging pad, navigation, 4G wifi, and a 12-speaker premium stereo. There’s also an 8.8-inch digital instrument panel behind the steering wheel, and the whole shebang can receive wireless upgrades via over-the-air updates.

Like so many cars, this central touchscreen is responsible for controlling pretty much everything in the car. Aside from the electric window switches and a few buttons on the steering wheel (one of which locks and unlocks the doors, bizarrely), there are just two physical buttons in the entire cabin, both of which are located in the ceiling above the rearview mirror, one of which operates the hazard lights and the other of which is the emergency call button. Literally everything else has to be operated - at least in part - by the touchscreen. That includes functions as simple as adjusting your door mirrors, or adjusting the speed and sensitivity of your intermittent wiper setting.

The sheer amount of functionality that the system has to handle makes it complex and distracting to use on the move. Things get a little easier as you familiarise yourself with the menu structure over time, but you’ll still find yourself hitting a dead-end when trying to find and operate one of the lesser-used functions.

Various functions can also be controlled remotely through a smartphone app, and this actually works reasonably well - this touchscreen tech is absolutely fine when you’re not driving a car - but it still feels a little bit like tech for tech’s sake.

Leapmotor B10 running costs

The price of the Leapmotor B10 depends on how you come by it. If you’re a company car driver, the price is - as near as makes no difference - £31,500 for the one version available. You don’t that price as the driver of a company car of course: instead, you pay monthly Benefit-in-Kind company car tax on a percentage of the car’s value, and thankfully, because the B10 is an EV, that percentage is very small indeed compared to what you pay on a petrol or diesel car, and will continue to be so for a good while yet. This will save company car drivers thousands - rather than hundreds - over the period of a company car contract.

Retail buyers pay a bit less at around £30,000. This is 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 for.

But how do those prices compare with those of rivals? Well, both the Jaecoo E5 and Omoda E5 start at a lower price than the B10, but that’s because they’re offered in a lower-spec trim level, while the Leapmotor isn’t. Specify the top-spec versions of those two rivals, which are comparable on equipment with the Leapmotor, and the Jaecoo becomes around £300 more expensive, while the Omoda becomes around £3,000 more expensive. Both these rivals are a teeny bit smaller than the Leapmotor, although there’s not much in it, and both are comparable on range, power, performance, and their flawed dynamics (albeit in different ways).

The MGS5 EV also has a lower starting price, but again that’s for an entry-level version that’s a way down on power and battery size, not to mention equipment. Once you’ve specced it up to become a long-range, high-spec variant that’s comparable on range, performance, and kit, then it becomes almost £4,000 more expensive.

It’s a similar story with the excellent Skoda Elroq. It starts at a similar price to the B10, but that’s for an entry-level version that’s behind in several areas. Specced it up to a level that has comparable range and performance, you’re around £3,500 worse off than with the Leapmotor. And, you can spend as much as you like on your Elroq, but the Skoda’s equipment level will never get anywhere near that of the Leapmotor.

All in all then, the Leapmotor B10 is undeniably cheap, but it’s certainly not the only cheap electric SUV of its size, so there are alternatives, especially if maximum equipment levels aren’t your priority.

In terms of actual running costs, a full charge of the B10’s 67.1 kWh battery (that’s total capacity, of which 65kWh is usable) will give you an average of up to 270 miles miles of range, according to WLTP figures. Assuming that your domestic power is charged at the UK’s national average rate (around 28p/kWh), that charge will cost you around £18 if you charge it at home. However, if you charge overnight on heavily discounted off-peak power, you’ll likely pay less than half that.

You’ll be able to do that easily if you have a 7.4kW home wallbox charger installed, as this will take your battery from empty to full in around nine hours. You won’t manage it if you rely on a regular three-pin domestic socket , because a full charge will take more like 24 hours. At least you get the cable that allows you to do that included in the price of that car, which is rare for an EV.

For those occasions where you need to charge up quickly on the move, the B10 can accept a maximum DC rapid charging speed of 168kWh, which Leapmotor says can get you a 20-80% top-up in 20 minutes. This will be by far the most expensive way of charging, though, with prices of 90p/kWh being commonplace on public rapid chargers of this speed.

As of April 2025, EV buyers no longer get to swerve VED road tax, meaning you’ll pay the same £195 flat rate as owners of petrol and diesel cars. At least the car’s low-ish price means you won’t be clobbered by the expensive ‘luxury car surcharge’ that applies to cars that cost more than £40,000 when brand new.

Leapmotor B10 reliability

Leapmotor is too new of a brand to feature in any of the usual reliability surveys we consult when making our predictions in this area, and the firm sells cars in small enough numbers that we can see it being a good while yet until that changes. That being the case, it’s difficult - nay, impossible - for us to be able to give you any sort of steer whatsoever on how reliable the Leapmotor B10 might prove.

We can tell you that Leapmotor provides a four-year, 60,000-mile warranty with its cars, which is better than the industry average of three years, 60,000 miles, but not by much. And, when many of the budget SUVs that the B10 competes with have a warranty of seven years and 100,000 miles, the difference in the other direction becomes more stark. And when buying from a relatively unknown manufacturer, that could be a key point in many people's decision-making.