Inside, you certainly get a lot of space for such a small car. One of Autocar’s 6ft-plus testers had no trouble climbing in and getting comfortable, and with two adults sat side by side, there is much more shoulder room than you might expect in this class, to go with the generous head and leg room.
In truth, it puts cars like the Spring, 500 Electric and even the larger Mini Cooper to shame. There’s also an Isofix mounting for a child seat if you need it too, the T03 being a ‘proper’ car.
The dashboard design is also trying to make you think you’re sitting in something much larger and more sophisticated. Indeed, it feels well assembled and everything appears less tinny than in a Spring, and the seats are much more comfortable.
Boot space is just below average for the class: while it’s deep, its aperture is unusually narrow, there’s a large load lip and the very modest 210-litre capacity is partly taken up by the charging cables. You could get a airline carry-on suitcase and a rucksack in there, but there won’t be room for much more.
Elsewhere inside, what isn’t covered in cloth (the seats and parts of the door cards) is made from hard, dark plastic. Usually, this would come in for criticism but that doesn’t seem fair when this car is so affordable in comparative terms, and how often do you sit and caress your car’s dashboard?
Even if you did, you wouldn’t find any truly unpleasant textures or rough edges. In the case of the front passenger’s grab handle, you would even find some smooth gloss plastic.
Infotainment system
The 10in touchscreen, while impressively big for such a small car, brings some major issues. The first is that the climate controls are on the touchscreen, rather than physical buttons, which means you have to avert your attention from the road for far too long to alter its settings.
The icons themselves are also much too small and the display’s definition is pretty poor.
The second occurs when you want to turn off the ADAS functions, which you probably will, despite Leapmotor being proud to have fitted them all to such an affordable car. To switch them off, you not only have to go into several touchscreen menus to deactivate them but you also have to stop and put the car in ‘Park’ first. This soon becomes extremely inconvenient and tiresome.
Another gripe we have concerns the driver attention system, which monitors you to make sure you haven’t fallen asleep at the wheel. Each time you yawn, a warning flashes up for 15 seconds and is accompanied by a high-pitched chime. Not only is this infuriating, but it’s also dangerously distracting.
You can get around this by covering the sensor mounted on the A-pillar when you want to yawn, but you shouldn’t have to do this.
Lastly, the infotainment system is not compatible with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. This would be fine if the native system was well resolved, but inputting details for the sat-nav is fiddly and the Bluetooth system doesn’t provide a totally reliable connection. It disconnected from a tester’s phone on three separate occasions over just one weekend, for instance.
