Leapmotor C10 - my experience after 9 months

I have been thinking about writing this review for a while now, and the last few weeks finally pushed me to do it.

After starting a new job in Europe, part of the package included a company car. In May 2025 I was handed a brand new Leapmotor C10 REEV. I’m not much of a car enthusiast and just wanted something functional, so I wasn’t overly concerned despite the lack of real reviews online.

At first glance the car seemed fine. I actually quite like the styling, although I’m not a fan of the boxy front. Inside it’s comfortable: decent seats, nice trim and a large central screen. The rear seats are spacious enough for my two kids and the boot is smaller than I expected but still an OK size. During the handover I did notice an alarming number of menus, options and gimmicks, but I kept an open mind. I naively thought the basics must work if they spent this much time on the animations.

The car uses a key card, and optionally an app you bind to your phone. This is where the problems began. The app would not bind at all. We spent more than an hour in the dealership: confirmation email arrived, but login said “username or password incorrect”. Password reset said the email wasn’t linked to an account. Registering again said it already was. The staff had no solution and eventually just sent me away with no app. A very modern ownership experience: cutting-edge technology that doesn’t exist.

From that point on, frustration became the dominant theme.

Without the app, the key card is the only way to unlock the car. There is only one reader, located on the driver-side wing mirror. I genuinely don’t understand this decision. Keys have worked for decades. Keyless entry has worked for years. 10 years ago, I already had a car that unlocked automatically with the key in my pocket.

With this car, approaching with kids or shopping means you must always walk to the driver’s door first. If the driver’s side is beside traffic, you step onto the road, potentially with small kids in your arms. Even more stupid, if you need something from the boot, you will have to walk to the drivers door, collect it and then walk back around the car again to lock it. Without the app, this “modern” EV behaves like something from the 1980s. There is also no obvious off button. The car switches off only when locked, which makes the already complicated process even more awkward. Progress, apparently, involves doing more walking.

The driver assistance systems are extremely intrusive. Lane assist frequently fights the steering wheel, often incorrectly. Speed warnings regularly think you are in a 30 zone when you are actually in a 50. Emergency braking activates randomly and mostly while parking because it imagines obstacles. The first time it happened I got out to check whether I had actually hit something. A driver-facing camera issues fatigue warnings if I yawn or rub my eyes. It is good to know the car cares deeply about my well being while at the same time running my stress levels to max.

Most features can be disabled, but they reset every time the car restarts. On one long motorway journey I stopped for coffee, forgot to disable them again, and once back at speed the car began constant beeping while tugging the wheel left and right. I had to pull onto the hard shoulder just to make it stop. It is no joke to say the safety systems at times are the most dangerous part of the car.

On the motorway the basic driving experience is also disappointing. The cruise control struggles to hold a steady speed and constantly oscillates up and down by a few km/h, which is very noticeable. The engine also runs at unusually high revs at highway speeds; at times I have had to turn podcasts to maximum volume and still struggled to hear them clearly. It almost feels like it needs an extra gear. Motorway driving in general just feels like a noisy, bumpy experience.

The interior interface is equally frustrating. There are two screens, a main display and one behind the steering wheel. Warnings appear on both, depending on what it is. The steering wheel blocks part of the smaller secondary screen, so you hear a warning and then search around trying to find what the car is complaining about. It’s a bit like playing a game show while driving.

There are no physical buttons at all. Even climate control requires navigating overly complicated menus to find what you need. These menus then reset to the home screen after a few seconds, so unless you are quick you will have to start again. Temperature logic also makes no sense: heating at 18°C can roast you while air conditioning at 28°C can freeze you. Instead of a normal temperature scale you get a full separate scale for heating, cooling and ventilation. Inside each of thesem there is multiple airflow modes (waves, mist, blasts) none particularly intuitive. I am still none the wiser on how to get my desired temperature, instead it is a lucky dip. I now spend more time negotiating with the air vents than the traffic. Exhausting.

The number of menus is also baffling. There are endless options for interior ambient light colours, brightness levels and animated light strips along the trim, multiple pages of customisation for mood lighting, yet basic usability still doesn’t work properly. It feels like development prioritised cosmetic gimmicks over fundamental functions. The car can display a rainbow across the dashboard in several different themes, but safely unlocking or adjusting temperature while driving remains a challenge. I can host a nightclub in the cabin, but not consistently enter it.

The seat automatically slides back when opening the door and forward again when seated. Nice idea, except if you close the door slightly too quickly it sometimes stays fully back, leaving you sitting miles from the wheel until you manually adjust it. It then takes another week to find the sweet spot of your seating position, only for the same thing to happen again.

Phone integration is another major issue. There is no proper Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. Instead the dealer provides a dongle that mirrors your phone onto the main display. First world problems, I know. But unbelievably frustrating. When you switch from the phone view to any native car menu, there is no way to return. The car effectively doesn't know that the phone exists. The only fix is unplugging and reconnecting the dongle. So in order to adjust a driving mode, or fuel usage, you lose the phone screen and the only way to get it back is to plug it out and back in, thereby restarting the cars screen.

Sometimes parts of the car’s interface overlay on the phone screen partially covering Waze or Google Maps. This is frustrating when using Waze as the arrival time is in the bottom of the screen, so in that case the only way to see your arrival time? Check your phone screen! Navigation by approximation. This is supposed to make life more convenient remember?

Audio controls are equally confusing. The steering wheel roller adjusts “media” volume by default, but calls, navigation and alerts all have separate levels accessed through an on screen menu. It took weeks to figure this out. The microphone also works intermittently with no clear cause.

Eventually, thanks to a Reddit user rather than the dealer, I got the app working. It allows remote unlock and preheating, but still requires opening the app and entering a code each time. Bluetooth proximity unlock exists but is unreliable, so I still end up using the card regularly. I would say 7 times out of 10, the phone or car is asleep and not connecting to each other, so I have to resort to the key card unlock, meaning the system designed to replace the card still depends on it.

After about nine months the key card itself began failing to read. Sometimes forcing everyone out of the car, locking it, waiting a minute, and unlocking again would fix it — embarrassing when you have passengers. Eventually it failed completely, leaving the car unable to start and forcing me to abandon it in another city and get my children home on public transport in freezing temperatures.

Following this, the garage did a software update which introduced a PIN-code start option so the car can theoretically be used without the card. You sit down and a keypad popup should appear on the screen and you enter the code to drive.

In practice, it’s unreliable. Sometimes the keypad appears instantly, sometimes not at all. Moving the gear selector can trigger it, but at times it can take 20 seconds of pushing the brake or moving the stalk.

Then, if you briefly leave the seat, as I do every morning to open the gate to my workplace, you must re-enter the code before moving again. So you end up stopped on a road, jumping out, getting back in and authenticating while traffic waits. It feels less like using a car and more like logging back into a computer after a timeout.

Overall the car feels rushed to market with little real-world testing. It is full of features intended to make driving easier, but many are unreliable or distracting, and some actively unsafe. The menus are clunky, the key system awkward, the phone workaround a complete and utter nightmare, and usability consistently poor.

It may be cheap and it may look fine, but after nine months I would not take this car again if it was for free. The sheer number of daily usability issues makes it hard to believe it was ever properly tested outside a showroom or on paper. Too many basic interactions like unlocking, starting, adjusting settings, even simply driving without interruption, require workarounds. Under all the styling and screens is not a finished product, but something that feels like it was released before real drivers ever had to live with it.