Motormouth: My motoring leap of faith with Leapmotor from ASEAN to China

Taking an automotive leap of faith with Leapmotor from Kuala Lumpur to Huzhou 2,600 kilometres away is way easier than doing a standing broad jump.

My army days are parked in the recesses of my young-senior memories, but I can still recall the trepidation of getting ready to jump strongly to the front from a standing position, with the physical training instructor alongside while I was beside myself with performance anxiety. 

As a physically-trained army boy with youth and vigour, I performed pretty well in my fitness test, even with the occasional stumble in the standing broad jump. 

Those days of peak individual fitness are long gone and more than three decades ago. These days, I might suffer a sprain if I tried to do a standing broad jump just for fun. 

Spraining the brain with mental gymnastics is safer and a little less painful. 

One cerebral exercise with an auto-renew gym membership in my Motorist editorial mind is about keeping pace with modern Chinese EVs.

Their battery-electric technologies are advancing relentlessly, their touchscreens are spreading rapidly, and their vehicular qualities are clearly scoring with consumers. 

China is also pushing new-age car brands and new-energy cars to export markets like nobody’s business. 

It is a team effort between LeapEnergy and LeapPower to realise the Leapmotor objective of making EV excellence accessible to more people.

Marching along with the country’s great leap forward/outward with EVs aplenty is Leapmotor International, a 49:51 joint venture between the eponymous Chinese company and storied Stellantis. 

In the sometimes weird yet always wonderful world of Chinese electric cars today, with said vehicles exploding onto the Malaysia scene like so many Labubus, the Malaysian motor industry has morphed into its current Middle Kingdom-dominated form. 

Based on what I saw at the high-tech facilities of LeapEnergy and LeapPower in China, Leapmotor is already scoring maximum points in its technological “standing broad jump”. 

For instance, the LeapEnergy Wuyi battery gigafactory is said to be the world’s first with “million-level super-integration”. It centralises the production of EV battery packs in a single industrial park, with a planned annual capacity of 1.72 million units. 

Not all the BEV batteries will be for Leapmotor, which is targeting global sales of 1 million new cars in 2026 - 400,000 units more than last year. But I believe that every technical enhancement by LeapEnergy will be applied to LeapMotor cars in their development phase, such as advanced powertrain architecture, improved range/recharging, tougher safety, and greater reliability.

As far as I can tell, Leapmotor EV technology is both sensible and credible, especially if you’re a low-tech, old-school driver like myself who fondly remembers yesterday while a high-tech, new-age tomorrow beckons. 

Leapmotor's vertical integration of BEV core components such as motors and batteries is currently one of the best in the business.