Long-term test: Leapmotor B10

Verdict

The Leapmotor B10’s high-voltage hiccups have been a serious annoyance and quickly soured my previously positive view of it. It seems that we just have a dud model and that no other owners are encountering the same issues. At this point, all I can hope is that the problem can be cured, and quickly, because I’m not sure how much patience I have left.

• Mileage: 10,132 miles
• Efficiency: 3.3mi/kWh

It’s amazing how quickly a relationship can sour. After a normal and generally positive getting-to-know-one-another phase for me and our Leapmotor B10, I was expecting us to have settled down into domestic bliss by now. Instead, it feels more like I’ve got the couples counsellor on standby and we’ve been spending more time apart than together. 

Let me rewind, back to the end of May, when the problems started. Literally the same week as my first report about living with this solid, spacious and quite smart Chinese SUV was published, I was suddenly unable to charge it from my home wallbox – or any slow AC charger for that matter – because every time I tried to use one, the car killed them. Well, it caused a fuse or two to blow. 

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I tried several different chargers and played with the car’s settings to see if it was because of something I had done, but to no avail. As a result, I couldn’t charge the car at home, which was both very inconvenient and rather expensive, because I could only use pricier DC rapid chargers to top up the 67.1kWh battery.

I pay 26p per kWh using my home charger, so fully topping up our B10 costs me roughly £17, whereas just a 10 to 80 per cent top-up costs roughly £38 at a public charger. Plus, although I could get more than 220 miles of range with a full battery, a partial charge would provide only around 180 miles. 

Luckily, I was able to send the Leapmotor off for an inspection very shortly after reporting the problem and technicians quickly diagnosed the cause as a faulty onboard charger. 

I feared this would put our B10 out of service for a long time, given that some of the new-to-the-UK Chinese brands don’t yet have every part for their cars to hand. Luckily for me, it was under warranty and a replacement unit was installed not long after, so the car was ready to be sent back to me within a matter of weeks, which I was impressed by. 

Once the B10 was returned, I plugged it into my home wallbox at the first opportunity, with my eyes shut and fingers crossed, hoping the problem had been resolved. Sure enough, all the fuses remained unblown and the car seemed to be charging fine. It wasn’t until the next morning when I saw the battery wasn’t full that I realised something still wasn’t right. 

It turned out that although the B10 was accepting a charge, it was maxing at 1.9kW. That is the sort of speed you’d expect to get when using a three-pin socket, whereas my wallbox charger can deliver up to 7kW. What kind of difference would that make? Well, fully recharging the Leapmotor’s 67.1kWh battery would take three days. And nobody has the time for that!

It was as if the car’s ‘Safety Current Limiting’ function had been activated. This is supposed to prevent an EV from overloading a house’s wiring by lowering the amperage, but when I checked to see if it had been turned on, everything looked normal. 

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So I got in touch with Leapmotor again, thanking the firm for the speedy repair job but informing it that the car needed to go back for some further tinkering. At the time of writing, the company’s technicians are still investigating the cause of this latest issue. 

Unsurprisingly, between the B10 being away for repairs and the problems I’ve encountered charging, I haven’t been able to spend much time driving it. However, when I got behind the wheel again, I did appreciate just how spacious the cabin is and the smart design, both inside and out. 

I also made time to finally programme the ‘Combined Settings’ profile that’s activated via a shortcut button on the steering wheel. This quickly tweaks the powertrain and chassis settings to my liking, and takes care of most of the driver-assistance systems.

Annoyingly, it can’t turn off the emergency lane-keep assist that is unable to cope with the narrow lanes and hedges on the roads near me, suddenly and sharply turning the wheel whenever it panics – which is frequently. That has to be turned off using the touchscreen. 

Meanwhile, I’ve also realised just how overly soft the ride is, with the B10 wallowing around. And I’d forgotten how infuriating it is that the car doesn’t always unlock when I walk up to it, or quickly locks again when I just walk around it after loading something in.

Leapmotor B10: first fleetwatch report

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A mysterious fault saw our B10 forced off the fleet while Leapmotor engineers investigate the cause

Well that didn’t last long. After living with our Leapmotor B10 for a little over a month, when I was starting to like the rather comfortable SUV, we’ve had to send it back because every time I plugged it into my home wallbox – or any AC charger for that matter – it killed them. By which I mean it caused a fuse or two to blow. 

The first time this happened, I thought my five-year-old wallbox had just packed in and I needed a new one. The second time, while I was trying to use the charger at my dad’s office, I thought I must be doing something wrong. But when it happened a third time at the Gridserve Electric Forecourt in Stevenage, I suspected it might be the car itself. By the fourth time, I knew something was very wrong with our Leapmotor. 

After figuring out how to get my wallbox working again, I activated the B10’s ‘Safety Current Limiting’ function that’s supposed to prevent an EV from overloading a house’s wiring by lowering the amperage and tried plugging it in again. Unfortunately, the charger still went kaput. 

Leapmotor has told me our B10 needs a new onboard charger, and that should hopefully fix this mysterious and very serious issue. The company is working to get us back on the road, but at the time of writing, Leapmotor still doesn’t know what caused the problem, and we’re not sure when the car will be back in action. 

Leapmotor B10: first report

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Comfy EV shows promise in spite of some annoying traits

• Mileage: 9,512 miles
• Efficiency: 3.6mi/kWh

Much like deputy editor Richard Ingram, who recently replaced his Volkswagen Golf R with a Citroen e-C5 Aircross, I have taken the motoring equivalent of a chill pill by swapping the fast, furious and rather flawed Abarth 600e for a soft, squidgy and oh-so spacious Leapmotor B10. 

As my colleagues will gratefully attest, the move from the stiff, uncompromising hot hatch into the much more comfort-focused Leapmotor has done wonders for my mood. 

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I’ve also been particularly grateful for the roughly 240 miles of range I’ve been getting from a full charge. Admittedly, this isn’t a huge amount – only just enough to get from London to Liverpool in one hit – but it’s a vast improvement over the Abarth, which couldn’t complete a round trip from my home in Hertfordshire to Gatwick airport and back without needing a top-up. Frustrating in isolation, but downright annoying given how often I drive this route for work. 

Unsurprisingly, with the B10 not being a serious hot hatch, there’s also a much more calming atmosphere to its interior. That’s thanks to its off-white upholstery, turquoise- blue ambient lighting and a huge panoramic sunroof that floods the cabin with sunshine. 

This makes the B10 easy to relax in while stuck in traffic on the M25, where I often find myself. My family have appreciated the room inside, and while the 430-litre boot isn’t as big as we might expect from an SUV this size, it’s enough for my daily needs or a couple of weekend bags. There’s lots of room under the boot floor for the charging cables, too. 

But the B10 is far from perfect, and it suffers from many of the same problems that I’ve encountered testing the latest Chinese cars. Particularly when it comes to the tech onboard. 

The biggest issue is the lane-departure and emergency lane-keep assist systems, which lose their minds on country roads. They think the car is too close to the white lines, which it’s impossible not to be because the lanes are narrow and the Leapmotor isn’t a small car – something I tried to point out to the B10 using a tape measure and a lot of patience. 

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I was very much hoping it would learn from my brief geometry lesson, because rather than just vibrating the wheel or a chime, the systems will suddenly and sharply steer the car towards a hedge or oncoming traffic. 

The lane-assist also occasionally panics when it detects a car coming its way, and will put me on a collision course with some shrubbery. My impression is the set-up has just been poorly calibrated, or Leapmotor hasn’t refined it for European roads.

True, you can turn these and the other ADAS systems off, but like most people, I often forget to do this before setting off, so have to hunt through the dozen or so menus in the touchscreen to find the right one while driving. There is a smartphone-like control centre with shortcut buttons for deactivating the speed-limit warning and driver-fatigue monitoring, but not the lane-keep tech. My hope is that Leapmotor will update these systems during my time with the car. 

I’ve also found other settings – such as how I want the steering and throttle response – will reset overnight, which I’ll only realise while on the road. The wireless Apple CarPlay also doesn’t always connect when I get into the car and will not work. The only solution I’ve found so far is to reset the B10 and pray.

*Insurance quote from AA (0800 107 0680) for a 42-year-old in Banbury, Oxon, with three points.

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