CarBrandLogos archive · Leapmotor · 2020

LeapmotorT03

A cheap Chinese city car that ended up being built in Poland.

Photo: User3204 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Leapmotor history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Leapmotor T03, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

The T03 is a small five-door electric hatchback, roughly the footprint of a European city car but packaged to seat four adults, with a front motor and a modest battery. It went on sale in China in 2020 at a price that undercut most of what else was available, and it became the car that gave Leapmotor its volume after the S01 failed to find buyers.

2020 Leapmotor T03 · User3204 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Design and engineering

Its second life is the more interesting one. When Stellantis took a stake in Leapmotor and set up a joint venture to sell the cars abroad, the T03 became the first model assembled outside China, at the former Fiat plant in Tychy, Poland, from kits. That made it one of the first Chinese-designed cars built inside the European Union, a route around tariffs that other manufacturers have since studied closely.

2020 Leapmotor T03 interior · User3204 · CC BY-SA 4.0

In production

It is not a sophisticated car, and it is not meant to be. It is small, well equipped for the money, and priced to be an obvious second car, which in a market of increasingly large and expensive electric vehicles has proved to be a reasonably rare position.

At a glance