Leapmotor C10 Design 2025 Review

The 2025 Leapmotor C10 arrives in Australia in two flavours, kicking off proceedings is the entry-level C10 Style from $45,888 (plus ORCs), while the flagship C10 Design is $49,888 (plus ORCs).

The Stellantis-backed Chinese brand is also offering sharp drive-away pricing for those that get in before March 31, 2025, with the Style priced at $47,500 drive-away and the Design at $51,500 (d/a).

Leapmotor has sweetened the deal even further with 12-months free access to the Chargefox network, too.

It’s ultra-affordable compared to the class-leading Tesla Model Y, undercutting the Chinese-built Musk-mobile by a good $10k.

Further simplifying things, every C10 rides on the same chassis and will come powered by the same 160kW rear-mounted electric motor. Every C10 is also fitted with the same 69.9kWh lithium-ion (LFP) battery that’ll serve up a claimed 420km of electric driving range.

Slower 400-volt architecture, however, means the C10 isn’t as quick to recharge its battery pack as some rivals and a maximum DC charging rate of 84kW. So the quickest you’ll be able to juice up from 30 to 80 per cent battery is approximately 30 minutes.

It does have vehicle-to-load (V2L) capability, although the fledgling brand says it’s still 'working on' providing an adaptor so owners can actually utilise it.

The equipment list – like many emerging Chinese EVs – is generous, with 18-inch alloy wheels (20-inchers for the Design model-grade), LED headlights, a 360-degree parking camera system, aero-optimised flush exterior door handles, dual-zone climate control, a 12-speaker audio system, wireless phone charging, a 10.25-inch driver’s instrument cluster and a 14.6-inch central infotainment screen.

The top-spec C10 Design adds faux-leather upholstery made of silicone, a heated steering wheel, heated and ventilated front seats, an electric tailgate, rear tinted windows and ambient interior lighting.

There’s also loads of safety and driver assistance aids on board every model, including autonomous emergency braking (AEB), blind spot monitoring, lane keep assist, lane centering and departure warning, rear cross traffic alert, and an advanced driver distraction warning system, to name a few.

Five exterior paint options and two funky interior hues (Midnight Aurora and Criollo Brown) are on offer.

Meanwhile, Leapmotor covers the C10 with a seven-year/160,000km warranty, where the seven years is strong but the 160,000km is not. The battery is covered for eight years/160,000km which is par for the course on both counts.

Capped price services are due every 12-months or 20,000km and work out to around $400 per year (or $2000 for the first five years).

One surefire way to capture the attention of new car buyers is with quirky design and outlandish looks but thankfully the 2025 Leapmotor C10 keeps it a little more casual.

The Chinese car-maker has opted for a more conventional exterior design and its inoffensive styling should see it appeal to a broad audience Down Under.

For those after a little more zest, be warned: the purple interior is much less purple and much more charcoal in real life than it appears online and in some of the brand’s imagery.

This reviewer was a little disappointed to be honest but a bright purple cabin would certainly be a brave move, even in 2025 it seems.

That aside, the C10’s cabin is cavernous, particularly in the second row, where there's leg and toe room galore! Taller adults should be happy with the space provided up front too, even if the front seats are set higher than we would’ve liked.

There are plenty of interior design cues borrowed from Tesla and while we can see the appeal of a virtually button-less interior (save for the steering wheel), physical buttons and dials are simply easier to use on the move.

Once you find your way around the touch-screen, which controls everything from side mirror adjustments to your headlights, it’s easy enough to find your way and the graphics are sharp, the screen responsive to touch.

The driving experience is mostly positive, too.

There’s no physical start button as with a lot of new EVs, so it’s just the swipe of a card (unless you’re using the app) on the dash, push the steering wheel mounted stalk down to ‘Drive’ and away you go.

An array of drive modes come standard, including a handy ‘custom’ option which allows the driver to personalise the level of re-gen braking and steering feel, for example. Overall, we found Comfort mode to be the best option.

Thankfully the brake issues we experienced on the C10’s international launch has since been rectified via several over-the-air (OTA) updates and according to Francesco Giacalone, the head of product and marketing at Leapmotor, the braking experience is now ‘smoother’.

Admittedly, we didn’t find the braking experience all that smooth until we hit the comfort drive mode and the pedal felt overly sensitive in some instances, making for a jerky feel at times.

Overall though, we had no big issues with the brakes on our test vehicles and a few hard brake tests revealed decent stopping power.

Round a corner too enthusiastically and the C10 responds with a mild amount of body roll but for the most part it’s a gold star to the Maserati engineers responsible for the C10’s suspension tune, which handled a mix of driving conditions with ease.

Elsewhere, we managed to better Leapmotor’s energy consumption claim of 19.8kWh/100km, with the trip computer in our test vehicle showing an average consumption of 18kWh/100km across highway and country road driving – and two different drivers.

But not every aspect of the C10’s drive is as good.

If you have even the slightest sporting ambition from your electric SUV, the 2025 Leapmotor C10 might not be the best option for you.

A claimed zero to 100km/h sprint time of 7.5 seconds isn’t too shabby but don’t expect the same rocket-like acceleration you get from many EVs. Instead, the chunky 2.4-tonne C10 feels borderline lethargic off the line in comparison to some of its peers.

There's talk of a BYD Sealion 6-rivalling PHEV version of the Leapmotor C10 that could pique the interest of some buyers.

That said, the C10 is not a sports car; it’s a budget battery electric family hauler and one that’s plenty capable of keeping up with traffic around town, plugging down the highway and zipping around city streets with relative ease.

It’s also a car that should have smartphone mirroring. Alas, the big 14.6-inch centre screen – even with its gaming software and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset – doesn’t offer Apple CarPlay or Android – and won’t for the foreseeable future.

That’s a huge omission in our eyes and one that means you can’t do something as simple as send a text message through the vehicle’s touch-screen while driving.

If you’ve connected your phone to the car via Bluetooth you could probably use voice-activated Siri to send a text as a workaround. However, this is something we’d have to test when we have more time with the car.

Another (albeit niche) frustration we had – and can see anyone with small hands having – is with the flush-mounted exterior door handles, which can be fiddly to operate depending on the angle (or hand) you use to open it.

We see kids with small hands needing two hands to open the doors but it could be an non-issue once better acquainted.

Attempting to adjust the climate control on the move also proved troublesome and while there’s loads of settings (from fan mode where the air swishes from side to side as if you’re standing in front of a pedestal fan, to direct mode), it can be difficult to find a happy medium to suit both the driver and passenger.

A burden of too much choice, perhaps?

But our biggest grievance with Leapmotor’s first local model was the sensitivity of its driver assistance aids, which like many other modern vehicles from Middle Kingdom are simply too intrusive.

The driver attention monitoring system goes a step further than most and brings up an audible warning and a visual warning on the infotainment screen if you yawn, telling you to consider pulling over for a sleep.

It told others to remove hats or glasses whilst driving and even told me to take a nap when I laughed at something a little too hard and it read my open mouth as a yawn. Quite bossy, really.

The lane centring and assist feature isn’t the most intrusive we’ve encountered but was still annoying enough to want to switch off, which you must do in two separate menus. Even more frustrating, you can only do it with the vehicle stopped and in ‘park’ or ‘P’.

Interestingly, there’s no manual handbrake in the C10 for the driver to operate; the car automatically applies the park brake once you’ve shifted to ‘P’.

This EV is far from perfect but even with its flaws, the 2025 Leapmotor C10 makes a decent first impression and its sharp value proposition is undeniable.

It’s a lot of electric SUV for your money, not to mention the plethora of standard equipment on offer, and an incredibly spacious cabin families will appreciate.

But its irritating driver aids take away from an otherwise decent experience behind the wheel, while the glaring omissions of smartphone mirroring could make it a hard sell for Aussies that will already need to justify taking the leap into a relatively unknown brand.

Leapmotor is certainly one to watch in the coming years and while the new C10 falls short in some areas, there’s lots of potential here. With a few improvements, it could be a real winner for budget-conscious family buyers.

2025 Leapmotor C10 Design at a glance:
Price: $49,888 (plus on-road costs)
Available: Now
Powertrain: Permanent magnet synchronous motor
Output: 160kW/320Nm
Transmission: Single-speed reduction gear
Battery: 69.9kWh lithium-ion
Range: 420km (WLTP preferred)
Energy consumption: 19.8kWh/100km (WLTP)?
Safety rating: Five-star (ANCAP 2024)

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