Leapmotor B05 review

You shouldn’t be short on passenger space, that’s for sure. At 4.4m long and almost 1.9m wide, the B05 is actually one of the largest hatches in its class. Feels it in here too, with loads of headroom up front and plentiful rear legroom. Rear seat passengers even get the ability to recline, and there’s room for their feet to fit under the seat in front. Nice.

Unfortunately, those front seats – which are heated and ventilated as standard – are a little lacking in adjustability and support, and they’re covered in a soft eco-leather that feels particularly cheap. In fact, most of the materials in the B05 are slightly substandard, with scratchy plastics and strange soft-touch surfaces abound. The whole cabin is lifted by the giant 1.02m2 panoramic roof, though.

What about the tech?

Front and centre is a giant 14.6in touchscreen that dominates the dash and needs to be used to control everything from the side mirrors to the climate, drive modes and active safety tech. The graphics are generally pretty sharp and it’s responsive to your inputs, but it’s overloaded with different menus and despite being such a large screen it doesn’t seem to offer the ability to display multiple functions at once. D’oh! Plus, the resolution of the reversing camera is seriously lacking.

The driver also gets an additional 8.8in display with some key info, but again we couldn’t find a way to display any nav instructions up there. Bit of a missed opportunity. You do get a decent 12-speaker audio system though, plus 64-colour ambient lighting and an air-cooled wireless phone charging pad on the centre console unit.

Is the boot also big?

Erm, not exactly. The compromise for having all that rear seat space is a smaller boot, so you’re looking at 345 litres of storage space with all seats in place. That expands to 1,400 litres when the rears are folded, but it puts the B05 well behind the Volkswagen ID.3 (385 litres) and the Renault Megane E-Tech (440 litres).