Dacia Spring vs Leapmotor T03: UK's cheapest EVs face off

Last year, it had a major facelift to Dacify it further and turn it into a more cohesive product for the European market – including the UK this time.

If you compare the Spring we have here with the old one, it might as well be an entirely different car. The Y-shaped light signature and cityscape pattern on the lower grille have really turned budget transport into a cool little city car, even if there is still something awkward-looking about its small-wheeled tippy-toe stance. If you peer through the rear wheel arch, you can actually see the torsion beam for the suspension.

We know what a Dacia is, even if it’s actually a Chinese-Indian Renault, but what the hell is a Leapmotor?

Fast-moving start-up, China, high-tech electric mobility, yadda, yadda. You’ve heard that sort of thing before, but what makes us all take notice is that Stellantis has a 21% stake in the company and owns 51% of Leapmotor International, a joint venture set up to increase Leapmotor sales outside of China.

Not only that, but it has started building left-hand-drive T03s in the Fiat plant in Tychy, Poland. In other words, our Franco-Romanian car is made in China, whereas our Chinese car could have been built in Poland, although right-hand-drive ones continue to come out of China.

So Stellantis gives credibility to Leapmotor in the form of brand recognition and a dealer network, but that’s about where the Stellantis involvement ends.

The T03 isn’t a cut-down Vauxhall Corsa: it’s a pure Leapmotor development. There’s a battery under the floor, a motor in the front and, like many Chinese cars, a design that is inoffensive but very derivative. If the front has shades of cross-eyed Smart Forfour, from the back it could be absolutely anything.

Instead, it draws you in by being apparently overspecced in almost every way, at least on paper. At the UK launch, Leapmotor’s PR team weren’t shy about making comparisons with the Dacia Spring and even brought a static Spring to show just how much better equipped the T03 is for the same price. Indeed, in a game of austerity Top Trumps, the Leapmotor wins easily.

It comes in just one spec, and for your £15,995, Leapmotor gives you a 37.3kWh battery, 94bhp and loads of equipment: a fully fledged infotainment system with navigation, adaptive cruise control, blindspot monitoring, a panoramic sunroof and 48kW DC charging.

Meanwhile, at Dacia, the same money will buy you a Spring with the upgraded motor (still only 64bhp), a battery of only 26.8kWh, no fast charging, no centre screen and none of that fancy-pants tech. Our test car is in Extreme trim, which adds an infotainment screen, cruise control and 30kW fast charging but is £1000 more.

In practice, though, these philosophies are emblematic of the different ways that the Chinese and European manufacturers develop their cars. What’s there in the Dacia works well, whereas you’re in for a bit more of a fight with the Leapmotor’s apparent luxury features.

Dacia Spring vs Leapmotor T03: Interior

The interior is a case in point. Inside, the T03 is clearly intended to feel like a ‘proper’ car, with its restrained styling and standard infotainment screen.

It’s unmistakably quite a small space, though, so it can’t help but feel slightly incongruous. There’s none of the sense of fun that small cars, including the Spring, are traditionally quite good at.

Although the Leapmotor’s touchscreen works passably well, it’s not great. It has no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, so you’re reliant on the radio and Bluetooth for media and the built-in system for navigation, which is quite fiddly to programme.

The climate controls are also on the screen, and although they’re permanently displayed in a bar at the bottom, the ‘buttons’ are quite small. Neither of these cars has automatic climate control, so you end up fiddling with the heater and fan speed a lot.

That process is so much easier with the Dacia’s physical knobs and switches. Our test car has the optional touchscreen with phone mirroring, and while the more basic version doesn’t have a centre screen at all, it has an integrated holder for your phone, which does media and navigation pretty well anyway.

Neither of the two has heated seats. That’s frustrating because it can’t be very expensive to fit heating elements to the seats. Given these cars are used primarily for short hops, you end up losing quite a lot of range to the heater when you just want your back to be kept warm.

With all that said, the T03 is far more accommodating than the Spring. Its doors feel much less tinny, the seats have more padding and the driving position is far superior to the Dacia’s.

The Spring makes you feel more like a circus bear in a comedy car. The pedals are too close for comfort and you sit quite high in relation to the controls and the top of the windscreen.

Both are small cars, so rear carrying space is inevitably limited. Surprisingly enough, at 6ft2in I can just about sit behind my own driving position in both, albeit slightly easier in the Leapmotor. That’s despite it being a little shorter in length than the Dacia. The T03 partly has its architecture to thank for that, because it doesn’t need to be able to house a petrol engine in the front for other variants, unlike the Spring. At the same time, it also sacrifices some boot space. Its 210-litre boot is notably tighter than the Dacia’s (308 litres) and has a much narrower opening.

Dacia Spring vs Leapmotor T03: On the road

The Spring makes more of its limited means on the road too. It’s easy to become jaded when it comes to power outputs in electric cars, but when you’re talking double figures, every pony counts. And in this case, the Leapmotor has almost 1.5 times as many of them as the Dacia. 

If this were true for the Mercedes-AMG C63 and the BMW M3, the Mercedes would have 768bhp.

According to the official figures, however, the Spring is only a second slower to 62mph, and subjectively you would struggle to tell the difference. Neither car is quick, but in both cases they have enough performance to keep up with traffic on A- and B-roads. Sure, you’re to the boards quite a lot, but while that’s tiring in a Kia Picanto screaming its little head off, it makes very little difference in an EV whether you use half or all the power.

Where you do feel the lack of go – in both cars – is on the motorway. Make no mistake: these are not quadricycles; they’ll cruise at 70mph if they have to and that makes them all the more versatile. But you can sense they’re not entirely happy doing it. Driving at 60-70mph requires a bit of planning, crosswinds affect them in a way that we’re no longer used to and you feel vulnerable between HGVs or when overtaking the SUVs trundling in the middle lane.

You might expect the Leapmotor to have another trump card here in the form of its adaptive cruise control. But it’s so poorly tuned that you might as well not have it. The way it seems to want to be either accelerating or braking, and struggles to maintain a speed, is just not comfortable. Although you can set it to standard cruise control, you have to be stopped and in Park to do so, which is not very practical on a motorway.

If you plan to do anything more than occasional motorway driving, neither of these cars is going to provide you with much joy, also because their range and charging speeds feel like a throwback to EVs from seven years ago. Still, both will do more than 100 miles on a charge, in winter, which is a good deal more than most people cover on a daily basis.

Again, the Dacia closes the on-paper gap. It may have a 10kWh-smaller battery, but it’s also considerably more efficient. On the same cold day, we achieved 4.2mpkWh from the Spring and just 3.4mpkWh from the T03. The Leapmotor has the longer range, but not by much.

City streets are where these two feel most at home. At only about 1.6m wide and with a turning circle of less than 10m (the Dacia has a manual handbrake if you need it to be tighter still, though maybe not in town), you can thread them through narrow gaps without a care in the world. The Dacia is perhaps marginally easier to place because you can see the edges of the bonnet, but if this is how you’ll use them, there’s very little in it. 

Bigger differences, of quality and character, surface on a country road. Some might see these as city cars, which they are, I suppose. Equally, they would be eminently useful for nipping into town if you live in a rural village with patchy public transport and no cycling infrastructure. You rarely appreciate a narrow car as much as when you’re dodging an oncoming truck on a narrow country lane.

Any sortie in the Leapmotor necessarily starts by turning off about seven different ‘safety’ systems, to save you being driven to distraction by the lane keeping assistance tugging at the steering or the driver monitoring berating you for yawning. It’s impossible to turn them off while driving, too. I find it hard to imagine an engineer or exec driving this car and deciding this is a pleasant enough way to travel. In the Dacia, everything works better in the first place and turning it off is done with a single button.

The Leapmotor unequivocally feels like the more mature car on the open road, though. It’s more planted, more stable, and you can be con dent that it will grip, whereas the Dacia feels flighty because of its loose body control, plastic Linglong EcoMaster tyres and rudimentary damping. The Spring’s rear axle seems to have next to no rebound damping and just slams down into the road a er sharp ridges and sleeping policemen. Both cars possess very light, disconnected steering, though the Dacia has a slightly keener front end, which actually makes it more fun if you’re prepared for the abundance of body roll and lack of grip.

A quick look online shows that acceptably grippy tyres for the Dacia wouldn’t cost very much. Those might swing the balance the other way, but if you had to give one of these cars to an unenthusiastic driver, you would pick the T03 because it has just that fraction more of a safety margin. It used to be a French national sport to coax a clapped-out Citroën 2CV or Renault 4 up a mountain pass at lightning speed, but let’s be honest: not everyone is into that.

To a greater or lesser extent, that is what these two cars feel like: the small cars of yesteryear. They’re quite tinny and not especially luxurious or capable, but they provide basic transport and there is something entertaining about driving them quickly down a country road and catching up all the dawdlers in their much faster cars. And while neither car will top any group tests for safety, you can bet your kneecaps that they’ll protect you better in a crash than a Citroën AX.

Dacia Spring vs Leapmotor T03: Verdict

Appointing a winner is tricky, because the Spring has gradually whittled away the T03’s on-paper advantage. The Dacia unapologetically feels like a small, cheap car. It does it well and with a sense of fun. The Leapmotor tries to be a more serious, big car and succeeds to a point but it also feels more like an appliance and frustrates with some of the underdeveloped ‘luxury’ features. There’s a place for both, but in the absence of outright competence, a small car is better with a sense of humour and the Dacia Spring is the more likeable product. 

Winner: Dacia Spring

Cheery and fun. There’s not much to it, but what little there is works well, except for the tyres.

Second: Leapmotor T03

More of everything, even if not everything is quite up to snuff. The more competent car, but at the cost of charm.