Leapmotor T03 review

If you need a small electric car for short hops or city driving, the Leapmotor T03 diligently ticks off the boxes that make it appealing on a spreadsheet.

It goes slightly further on a charge than its main rivals – the Dacia Spring and BYD Dolphin Surf. You also get more standard equipment and a slightly quicker 0-62mph time, and you’ll probably find that monthly payments are marginally less than for an equivalent Spring or Dolphin Surf.

But besides the doleful eyes and slight smile on the T03’s face, there’s not much in the way of styling. It is just a box on wheels, with a range of mostly monochrome paint colours and one set of alloy wheels. You might like its restrained, sensible styling if you’re not a fan of the Dolphin Surf’s more out-there design or the Spring’s proud cheapness. However, we found those other cars a bit more charming than the T03.

The T03 manages up to 165 miles to a charge, which seemed achievable in our test car, and it’ll fast-charge. When the need arises, you can take it out of city limits without worrying how it’ll cope. It’s comfortable for such a small and cheap car, although you will have to put up with lots of wind noise on the motorway.

You get a four-year warranty (the Spring is covered for three, the Dolphin Surf for six) and the T03 is built in Fiat’s factory in Poland, but it’s hard to know how safe the T03 is. Six airbags and a host of driver assistance features come as standard, but the T03 hasn’t yet been tested by Euro NCAP.

In trying to feel like a grown-up car, the Leapmotor T03’s interior is a murky sea of grey and black. It’s drab and unappealing, and more so if you were to compare it against the new Renault Twingo.

Build quality is fine for the price, and the fabric-covered armrests mean that the T03 comes with precisely two bits of fabric more than the completely plastic-covered Spring.

While all-round visibility is pretty good thanks to the T03’s upright body, it might be hard for some people to find a comfortable driving position. The front seats don’t go back far enough to accommodate a tall driver, and the steering wheel doesn’t adjust in and out, only up and down.

Unlike a lot of Chinese-developed cars boasting a snappy and crisp touchscreen, the T03’s feels very much like ‘My First Touchscreen’. It’s slow to respond to your prods, it’s reasonably limited in its feature set, and there are some odd interface choices. Having one of the primary ‘buttons’ dedicated to unlatching the boot seems too prominent for how often you’ll use it, especially when some useful screens are buried within sub menus.

The touchscreen’s positioning is also a frustration. It feels like it’s mounted quite low, so you need to take your eyes fully away from the road to use it, and we often found that we could see a reflection of the front passenger’s face in the display, which makes it hard to see what you’re looking at.

The digital driver’s display isn’t much better – the outline of a set of dials isn’t relevant to what’s displayed on the screen, and the ‘vehicle started successfully’ message makes it sound like this might not always be the case. The same message also comes on when you turn the car off…

Then there’s the audio system, which reduces Taylor Swift’s latest masterpiece to little more than a collection of noises. It actually sounds like you’re listening to something from the car next to you, and even for casual listeners it’ll be disappointing to live with.

Still, you get a fair bit of ‘big car’ features as standard in the T03, such as adaptive cruise control, a glass roof, climate control and a (grainy) reversing camera. There aren’t any trim levels to pick from – every T03 gets the same spec list.

Because the front seats don’t go back very far, there’s adult-friendly legroom in the back of the T03 – although anyone taller than average height might feel marginally claustrophobic. Headroom’s okay as well and, overall, the T03 feels spacious for a 3.6-metre-long car. It's actually one of the smallest cars you can buy.

Up front, storage is decent enough, with a useful glovebox, reasonable-sized door bins, a central cupholder and a cutout to slot your phone into – with conveniently placed charging sockets just above.

Rear-seat features are limited to door bins and another central cupholder. The Isofix points are hard to access, seemingly buried within the seat material.

You can only fold the rear seats down from the boot, which isn’t really an issue, but you don’t get a split-folding rear backrest – unlike in the Dolphin Surf and Twingo. As such, you can either carry passengers or luggage, not a combination of both.

If the boot was bigger, this might not be a snag. But the 210-litre boot is small compared to the 308 litres you get in the Spring and Dolphin Surf. It’s a bit of an odd shape (because of the car’s diminutive dimensions) and there’s no parcel shelf to stop onlookers checking out your stuff.

The T03 needs a 37.3kWh battery to do 165 miles on a charge, whereas the Dacia Spring’s 26.8kWh battery musters up 140 miles. So while neither of these cars costs much to run, especially on an EV-focused home tariff, the Spring will be cheaper to fill up than the T03.

With 45kW fast-charging, the T03 can claw a 30-80% charge in 36 minutes, which isn't exactly competitive with some cheap EVs. You probably wouldn’t want to be doing that too often unless you like the solitude of waiting at a charger. Even though the Spring can’t charge as fast, its smaller battery means the same percentage top up will take roughly the same amount of time as the T03.

Unsurprisingly, the 95hp T03 feels quicker than the 65hp Spring, with the power being made available gradually rather than all at once.

When you’re just pottering about, the Leapmotor T03’s driving experience is quite polished, especially for such a small car. It rides decently, never feeling brittle or nervy, although we’d stop short of calling it genuinely comfortable. Perhaps it’s un-uncomfortable. Look at us making up words.

On the motorway, you’re very aware that the T03 doesn’t have Rolls-Royce levels of sound deadening. There’s a constant buzz of ambient noise that reverberates around the cabin, and the wind noise is pretty intrusive. In fact, the way the wind whistles around the wing mirrors is a bit like the whistling you get from empty roof rails at high speed.

The budget tyres don’t provide much grip, and it’s a bit too easy to make the tyres squeal and lose traction. Cornering at anything more than a sedate pace can induce understeer. You don’t get a lot of tread on the skinny tyres, either, so you might go through a set quicker than anticipated. When it’s time to replace the tyres, it’s worth upgrading to a premium brand even though they’re double the price.

The numerous driver assistance features can be more of a hindrance than a help, such is the frequency of bongs and the infrequency of an accompanying message telling you what the bing was for. Our test car had an erroneous seatbelt reminder warning, which didn’t help matters.