Not to be confused with Lepas, or Leap, LeapMotor is a Chinese EV manufacturer that has a 51/49 partnership with Stellantis to sell its vehicles outside China. It’s now here in South Africa, adding to the enormity of Chinese offerings in the local market.
My Watts & Wheels co-host, Duncan McLeod, flew overseas last year to drive it and liked it a lot — but was unimpressed by all the bonging sounds it made.
And then I got it for a week to see what he was on about.
Stellantis/LeapMotor are calling it a REEV – a range-extended electric vehicle. It isn’t.
It’s a PHEV – a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. The only difference between the C10 and other PHEVs is that the engine inside the C10 only generates electricity for the batteries (something similar to the BMW i3, if we go back some years), which then power the car through the rear wheels via an electric motor. A PHEV, on the other hand, does the same thing but also adds some drive from the petrol motor to the wheels.
Semantics aside, I will concede to the REEV label as a differentiator because in my mind it makes sense that there is less complicated stuff happening mechanically between the engine, drive to the wheels and charging of batteries. A REEV in my mind sounds simpler mechanically. The onboard engine is just a petrol-powered generator à la the Top Gear-style EV they made all those years ago. Minus the internal cabin fumes, of course.
Knob count? Zero
“Cleaner”, however, is a key word for the C10. The interior lines take minimalism to an extreme that even a minimal minimalist will appreciate.
Knob count? Zero.
Dial count? Zero.
Slidey adjustey thingy count? Zero.
Even the multifunction wheel is minimalist by today’s standards. Two stalks – one of which is a gear selector/cruise control (adaptive) – are included left and right of the wheel, and if you look skywards, the controls for the fixed panoramic enormous sunroof cover are … buttons. Should you feel the urge to resist any knob/button engagement in your quest for perfect minimalism, you can rest happy knowing you can access this functionality via voice control.
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That said, the voice control isn’t quite as slick as I remember Chery’s being, but it’s a hundred million times better than the early derivatives from the Germans, which were rubbish. And voice control is useful for silly things that the LeapMotor occasionally forgets to do, such as turning the radio back on when you get into the car. This is likely a setting somewhere, but in my time with the car I couldn’t find it – even if I didn’t look very hard.
Now. With no knobs in sight, everything is controlled from the centrally located touchscreen. This is obvious. What is perhaps not so obvious is that this is far easier than you’d think, and I was in truth dreading it.
First, the screen itself is a 14.6-inch hi-res unit and it is super bright. Second, it is fast with a capital F. When you’ve used a slow one, you’ll know how annoying that rapidly becomes. Speed matters.
A lot of thought has gone into the menus. It will take you nigh on zero time to figure it out. You will spend more time working out just how much stuff there is to be had on the C10. Take the interior lighting settings as an example. If you can name it, the car can probably do it with the lighting. And so it goes, on and on. The toys list is, shall we say, extensive.
All settings have been grouped logically, with sub-menus either screened into tabs or short scrolls. This is good because if you have used long scrolls you know how awful they are.
There are one or two issues. Having to adjust mirrors from the menu is a (relative) pain. Ditto headlight adjustments for ride heights. The trade-off is between the stunning minimalist interior and having to access a menu. The question is how often you need to do XYZ and what impact it has on your life. On mine, if you can believe it, the impact was nil.
Aside from the occasional once-in-a-blue-moon operations, it is the day-to-day stuff like aircon, music, navigation and drone control (I mean WhatsApp) that really matters. LeapMotor has thought of that, and where there would be a button there is an icon – big and easy to get to. Once you’ve learnt it, you’ve learnt it, and it’s easy to hit Auto for most things and let the car do the rest. Volume controls and some operability of your tunes are via the steering wheel, and the powered windows are the only knobs in town, located on the door grabs (and to add to the happiness factor, they work the wrong way around, where up is down and down is up).
As if by magic
The aircon is okay – in midsummer South Africa on a hot day it could use more power to cool the car faster. As you might expect, even the air vents have no controls – cold air is blown as if by magic from hidden vent bars in the dash that fire up and forward and combine in ways to direct air where it needs to go, all driven from the easy-access menu.
Selecting your music source could be a little easier, but the car does seem to remember when you have your Tidal connected and continues from where it left off – which, as I have pointed out, it doesn’t seem to do with the radio for some odd reason.
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The aircon doesn’t have the quiet sophistication of a Lexus – it’s borderline noisy. But, and this is a big “but”, without the radio on, the aircon is by far and away the loudest thing in the C10. Unless you’re tumbling down a mountainside, that is. Without extreme road conditions and extreme road speed, the C10 is unbelievably quiet on the go — to the point of being remarkable. There is almost no wind noise, almost no tyre noise, and very little comes from the suspension unless you hit a big bump by mistake.
The cabin exudes a sense of “quality in silence”, and it’s almost easy, because of the minimalism, to overlook the cabin quality for lack of adornment. But the quality is everywhere you look, and this is as you should expect from an R800 000 car in a highly competitive price segment. There are many, many competitors to the C10.
The materials feel top drawer, the comfort levels are high, and even extend to auto heated and vented seats. No head-up display is a minor disappointment, but the adaptive headlights are excellent. The lack of cooling for the fast-charge wireless phone charger is forgiven for it being a fast-charge wireless charger.
Rear-seat space is simply staggering, bordering on ludicrous. I was genuinely left wondering whether I’d prefer a bigger boot — and why they didn’t make the rear seats electrically adjustable fore and aft, such is the quantity of space on offer (I’m being facetious). The rear seats are not adjustable, but that doesn’t matter because you need to experience this space to believe it. The flat floor common to EVs is included free of charge.
At the rear, the boot floor itself is relatively high to accommodate a space-saver spare tyre — a trade-off easily accepted. Overall depth and height is good, but if you fold the seats flat your loading space goes from 435l to 1 410l, to give you an idea of the enormity of the space on offer to passengers. You’ll still get those large suitcases for the holidays into the boot without the seats folded down.
Speaking of holidays…
The C10 has a 28.4kWh battery and a mass of just over two tons. Range is a claimed 145km but when fully charged reflects 160km. When you hit around the 35km mark, the engine generator kicks in — not that you’ll really notice — and charges up the batteries. This petrol component claims an additional 950km of range from 50l, but I didn’t get the chance to test it. To be frank, I’m not sure I buy that claim if you’re doing 1 000km in one stretch. I base this on my intuition of maths regarding weight and speed. To be verified, if Stellantis wants me to.
What I can say is that I told Stellantis that with enough time I could do 5 000km on a single tank of fuel in the routine schedule. Having spent a week with the car, there is no doubt that I am absolutely sure I can do it — if you plug the C10 into even something as simple as your three-pin ordinary house plug overnight, you will get into the car every day with something like 150km of range available. Which is plenty.
Quiet refinement
I did as much mileage in the C10 as I could because 1) I could and 2) I wanted to see if my 5 000km claim had legs. I logged just over 480km. I charged three times on fast chargers simply because I had Stellantis’s charging card and profeshunal journalism the way I do it don’t pay good. I also left it overnight on my plug at home for three nights. I forgot to plug it in one night, so you can scratch one of those public charges if you remove the muppet from the equation.
The petrol engine kicked in twice — once when I wanted to see what would happen and once when I had gone on a 140km round trip to drop something off in Pretoria. I would have made it home, but you can’t quite flatten the battery completely. The engine wants to kick in with around 35km range left. You can override it to drop to 20km, but why? The point was made.
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Of course, you can choose different modes to drive in — you can have the petrol engine kick in far earlier to ensure the battery is topped up rather than run down. My logic was that I wanted maximum EV, so it stayed in EV-only mode for the duration of the week. I saw no advantage to any of the other modes for my purposes.
On the road, power feels like more than the claimed 152kW — mostly, of course, thanks to 320 electric Nm that punch the C10 seemingly faster off the line than the 8.5s 0-100km/h time claimed. GTIs will catch you and overtake you once they realise what is happening, but off the line they need to be awake. Top speed is 170km/h, but I didn’t test that.
I was nervous of the dreaded bongs when on the road. The safety suite is extensive and spans all of it — the list is long. The C10 has a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating, after all, which is excellent. And happily the bongs have clearly all been turned off or down to mild noises. The biggest irritation is the driver alert sensor — and whoever invented that in China deserves death via a panted crotch infestation of fire ants over an extended period of time.
There is a workaround to this piece of Satan’s own invention. There is a shortcut button on the steering wheel that you can programme. I programmed it to turn this and the lane-keeping assist off — because I am fast finding that lane-keeping assist is more of an annoyance than assistance.
All that said, the C10 is a surprisingly excellent SUV-sized vehicle. I didn’t take it off-road — but it will be just fine there, too. It just will. The C10 is solid, it is supremely comfortable and although the soundbar-derived sound system needs to gain around 6dB on the top end to give it some extra volume, the biggest gripe I had with the car comes down to its NFC credit card-type key.
That thing has got to go. I hated it. Having to tap the mirror to open the car, to unlock the petrol/charger cap, to open the boot — every single time. Having to scratch around with the key to start the car via the NFC reader in the central console where the phone fast charger is located — because when they say NFC they really do mean near, as in position-perfect — and repeating every time you open the driver’s door…
Hell no. It needs to be gone. Yesterday.
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And that, truly, is the worst I can say about the C10. It is a surprisingly good car, perhaps because I was expecting it to be way more annoying than it is. In fact, if truth be told, I’d be happy with one of these over a significantly large number of its direct competitors because I think it’s the better car. If you’re in this price point, you really need to take a closer look, because it is that easy to live with. Even with the stupid NFC key. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
- The author, William Kelly, is co-host of TechCentral’s EV motoring show, Watts & Wheels