I do love it when a carmaker skips the usual bog-standard white paint option and offers something a little more eye-catching as a car’s standard, no-cost colour.
Peugeot is the master at this, offering rich greens and blues, and even the occasional orange, as the included-in-the-price paintwork, but bravo to Chinese brand Leapmotor for making mustard yellow the standard shade for its new B05 electric hatchback.
Actually, technically it’s Lightning Yellow, but it’s definitely the same shade as a good spicy condiment. Or maybe a nicely made custard. Either way, it’s definitely not washing machine white, nor predictable metallic grey (both colours are available, if you must, along with blue and black) and that’s a good thing.
The B05 is the fourth Leapmotor model to arrive here from China. Of course, it has European links as part of the Stellantis Group’s part-ownership of the brand. Stellantis owns a small slice of Leapmotor’s Chinese operations and a much bigger slice of the company’s international sales set-up.
Following on from two SUVs (the medium-sized B10 and larger C10) and an impressive small city car (T03), the B05’s sales pitch is that it’s a conventionally shaped five-door family hatchback, but with electric power that should be easy to live with thanks to a decent range.
That range is up to 485km for the versions with the big 67.1kWh battery, but you’ll have to make do with 401km from a 57kWh battery if you want to enjoy the B05’s biggest selling point – its price.
Starting from €28,998 (inclusive of grants) the B05 is considerably cheaper than the likes of an Opel Astra Electric or Peugeot E-308, or indeed the petrol versions of those cars, and the VW Golf. The six-year warranty is enticing too.
It looks most like the Golf, at least from the front three quarters, which is the B05’s best angle. From here, it looks sleek and almost purposeful, but the side view is a bit less prepossessing, as it looks a bit blobby and distended from side-on (rather like a mid-2000s Seat Leon that’s piled on the pounds). The rear view is neat but forgettable, with the now too-predictable full-width light bar.
Still, that distended side view makes for plenty of space. Up front in the B05 there’s a high-quality dashboard, which is lifted more or less entirely – minus some loftiness – from the B10 SUV, with which the B05 also shares its platform.
The inevitable big screen in the centre looks impressive, but as ever proves to be a bit too fiddly for its own good in actual use and the only physical buttons are the Tesla-style roller switches on the steering wheel.
The front seats are comfy but also soft enough to cause concern that they might not support your back sufficiently on a long journey.
At least the rear seats are spacious, certainly far more so than those of any conventional alternative bar perhaps the Skoda Scala. The boot holds a mere 345 litres, but then that’s the convention of Chinese-designed cars; rear seat space over boot space.
One thing the B05 is not lacking for is power. Its single rear-mounted electric motor develops a robust 218hp, which used to be hot hatch territory.
And yes, this is a rear-wheel-drive family hatchback; take that, BMW 1 Series.
The B05’s porky 1,837kg kerb weight smothers some of its hot hatch potential, but enough remains to make this hatchback feel certainly lively, if not quite hot. Efficiency is good too – we averaged just under 16kWh/100km without really trying, and that should be good enough for a circa 400km range in real-world driving.
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Better yet, the B05’s battery uses lithium-iron phosphate technology, so while it’s not as efficient as some other batteries, it is cheaper to make, and much more tolerant of charging, so you can bung it up to 100 per cent without really worrying about it. Capable of taking 174kW of DC, fast charging speed is impressive and better than some much more expensive cars.
However, it doesn’t take long to discover why the B05 is quite the bargain it is. They don’t seem to have spent much time developing the chassis or the steering.
Not every car has to be a GTI or an AMG but with cars in this segment up against standout models such as the VW Golf it needs to do much better.
That VW, the Ford Focus, the Opel Astra and even the Toyota Corolla have long been able to provide the driver with a mixture of comfort, precision and safety.
The B05 feels safe enough and it doesn’t exactly misbehave. If you dial up the “Sport” steering feel from a Byzantine on-screen menu you might even convince yourself you’re having some fun for a few minutes, but after a while on a twisty road it’s clear that the priorities here were price and fitting a big touchscreen, not how the B05 drives.
The steering is entirely free from feel, but I wish I could say the same about the suspension. The springs are firm, which means you feel every bump, but oddly there’s really good isolation so you don’t hear the thumps and whumps. This is a good thing, but then the stiff springs don’t do a good job of keeping the body level, so there’s a surprising amount of roll when cornering.
Again, this is not a bad car per se, it’s just no fun.
But there is hope. Opel and Leapmotor seem to be working more closely together these days and the engineers at Rüsselsheim are the experts at providing sharp steering and solid body control.
Opel calls it the “Autobahn Feel” and it’s present even in the company’s low-cost Frontera. If those same engineers can work with Leapmotor to work on a future B05 update, then we could be on to something really good. In the meantime, good enough will have to suffice.