Leapmotor B10 vs Rolls-Royce Spectre (bev)

What's the difference?

I’ll be a shame if the B10 doesn’t sell well, because it doesn’t suffer from many of the downfalls of its compatriots and its price is extremely competitive for what you get.

As a comfortable smallish SUV, it meets par, and it’s on the better side of tech when it comes to cars from China, and it doesn’t have any major on-road red flags.

You really wouldn’t be disappointed with this having paid $40K, just skip the base model and go for the Design.

Note: CarsGuide attended this event as a guest of the manufacturer, with travel, accommodation and meals provided.

Personally, I was very much taken with the looks, and the feels, of the new Rolls-Royce Spectre, which delivers everything you’d expect from this brand, and seems to have lost nothing by switching to electric propulsion. The trick, it seems, in turning your brand into an EV one is to have made your cars silent in the first place.

But the real verdict comes from the people hurling their Spectre orders at the company, which has received so many of them it’s being forced to ramp up production. And 40 per cent of pre-orders are from new customers. Honestly, it’s as if they were all just waiting for an EV to drop a million on.

Right after we praise the B10 for its value, we need to talk about its looks. A slight drop in tone as the second Leapmotor to land in Australia looks an awful lot like the first, and it’s relatively bland.

It’s not ugly, but it’s not particularly inspiring and there’s not much character to this little electric SUV.

It’s got a very upright silhouette at the front with a slightly sloping roofline at the rear, so the overall shape is appealing, but the lack of distinct features makes the B10 an anonymous commuter for now, especially with its similarities to the C10.

You can tell them apart by the C10’s slightly larger size if they’re near each other, or the B10’s more in-line headlight bar, where the C10’s have a ‘droop’ at the sides.

The large section of black at the lower half of the front is also unappealing, though darker colours like the optional 'Starry Night Blue' or 'Dawn Purple' (both $990) blend into it better than standard 'Light White'.

To its credit, at least the B10 doesn’t fall victim to the design crutch of adding trim and plastic for no reason.

In terms of the specifics, the B10 is 4515mm long, 1885mm wide and 1665mm tall with a 2735mm wheelbase, making it quite the large small SUV.

Inside, the cabin looks and feels roomy thanks to the test car’s light interior, decent windows and the light from the sunroof, as well as the fact the EV powertrains are compact and generally don’t interfere with cabin space.

Materials aren’t all scratchy hard plastic, though it is dotted around, and the general look of the B10 inside feels more premium than its price would have you thinking, despite the simplicity of the layout and design.

Making a vehicle as enormous as the Spectre look good is no mean feat, but Rolls has done a hell of a job, from most angles. The massive Pantheon Grille is something to behold in the metal, and because it doesn’t need to let air into an engine bay, it’s been designed for airflow, as has so much else. Rolls achieved a drag coefficient of 0.25, which is good for extending EV range, and they even spent more than 800 hours in a wind tunnel working on making the Spirt of Ecstasy hood ornament as aerodynamic as possible (she’s had her wings clipped, apparently).

The modern take on the classic grille combined with a chesty bonnet and very cool DRLs give the Spectre a look of classic modernity from the front, while the proportions over all give it a great side profile.

Apparently the design brief was based on some majestic cliffs, the Seven Sisters of Sussex, and the car definitely has that level of grandiosity.

The only weak point is the rear, which had to be sheer for aero reasons - and features the narrowest legally possible rear lights, which are supposed to look like “islands in a lake”, apparently. To me, driving behind one, the rear view is just a little dull.

The luscious interior is meant to be an example of “Automotive Haute Couture”, meaning hand made and stupidly expensive, and Rolls also humbly refers to it as a “cosseting art lounge”. It all sounds a bit over the top until you sit in it, and discover that it really does feel beyond special.

Getting into the B10 requires a minor annoyance - unlocking and locking the car requires a keycard to be tapped on the drivers’ side mirror like you're scanning to access your floor in a hotel elevator.

There’s an app that adds a fair bit of functionality, but having to whip your phone out ahead of jumping in the car is also irritating.

Once you’re in, though, the space inside the B10 is well laid-out, even if much of its functionality is crammed into the big central touchscreen - it’s always ‘points off’ for a lack of physical buttons in this section of a review.

Once you’re used to it and have sorted out your personal settings on the multimedia software, it becomes more natural and less distracting, though Apple CarPlay and Android Auto would occasionally lag in the car on test.

The good news is they now exist for the brand in the B10, with the Leapmotor C10 still lacking the vital in-car mirroring tech.

The ergonomics and interior space work well, generally, with comfortable pews and good vision, plus decent spaces to keep things out of the way. The phone charger being in a very visible and accessible position might tempt some naughty screen-keen drivers, and being in the sun without a vent for cooling while charging means your phone will get proper hot.

The second row is extremely spacious, belying the fact this car is classified as a small SUV. Oodles of legroom and enough headroom for a tall adult means the B10 outguns rivals in terms of good options for parents (note the B10’s extremely strong 95 per cent child safety score from ANCAP, too) or anyone who needs to cart humans around regularly.

Behind the second row is a 490L boot, which becomes 1475L when the second row is folded down.

There’s space under the floor for cables and messy bits, but unfortunately no spare wheel, just a tyre repair kit, so more points off for that.

If you’re looking for the modern EV style interior, you can forget it, because Rolls says it didn’t want “any of that funky stuff” in the Spectre, so no giant screens in here. Indeed, I switched into a Rolls-Royce Ghost at one stage to be driven somewhere and the interior was almost exactly the same, although the new car gets a more modern fully digital dash. 

There’s plenty of room for water bottles and oddment storage and the sense of space for the driver and front passenger is suitably grand, but the rear seats are really for spoilt teenagers rather than Rolls owners. They’re not uncomfortable, at all, but they just feel a bit squeezed, you wouldn’t ask to be chauffeured in a Spectre, clearly it’s a Rolls you’d choose to drive yourself. 

The boot is wide, deep and long with a volume of 380 litres.

Australian pricing for the Rolls-Royce Spectre starts from $770,000 before on-road costs, and on the point of whether that represents value, well not to me, but certainly the huge number of orders Rolls claims to have been hit by suggests otherwise.

You do get a lot of car for your money, because the Spectre is vast and weighs almost three tonnes, and there’s no doubt that the interior is nicer than most people’s houses, or even the nicest hotel you’ve ever seen, and that the top-notch umbrellas hidden in each door are a nice touch.

One of the nifty and unexpected features the Spectre offers is a “Rolls-Royce Sound”, which you can toggle on and off. With the fake noise off, the car is freakishly quiet - apparently during testing they achieved a level of EV silence so incredible that people found it “disturbing” and had to engineer some sound back in - but with it on you get just the most subtle of guttural sounds. Every other company so far has gotten fake noise wrong, but Rolls has nailed it with the Spectre; it’s just loud enough, but suitably restrained as well.

You also get the wondrous Starlight Headliner, which uses optic fibre cables to paint the night sky on the roof, complete with shooting stars, and in the Spectre you can now have the stars fitted to the inside of its massive coach doors as well.

There’s only one powertrain option for the Leapmotor B10, a single, rear-mounted electric motor that produces 160kW and 240Nm, which makes the electric SUV good for a claimed 0-100km/h time of 8.0 seconds in both variants.

Top speed is a claimed 170km/h, also regardless of the variant.

For the first time ever, this Rolls-Royce has no magnificent engine, no throbbing 12 cylinders, no, it has two separately excited synchronous motors, one on each axle for seamless all-wheel drive. The front motor makes 190kW and 365Nm while they’ve sensibly sent more grunt to the rear, which gets 360kW and 710Nm. Either motor on its own would be enough to power a normal car. The total figures are 430kW and 900Nm, which is supercar like.

The battery is made up 804 cells, weighs 700kg and has a net capacity of 102kWh, and the designers used it as a sound-deadening agent for road noise, because it’s so massive. 

The Spectre can hit 100km/h in 4.5 seconds, which feels very fast indeed when you’re piloting something that weighs 2890kg and is 5.5m long.

Leapmotor claims the B10 will, from its LFP battery of either 56.2kWh for the Style or 67.1kWh for the Design LR, draw 17.2kWh/100km or 17.3kWh/100km, respectively under WLTP testing.

The result is the Style offering up a 361km WLTP-tested driving range, and the Design LR a more useful 434km.

While we were unable to properly confirm this claim on the launch, the trip computer after a mix of highway driving and more spirited back-road testing displayed a figure of 13.5kWh/100km, while the previous 1447km of driving had reportedly measured in at 14.7kWh.

Charging from 30 to 80 per cent takes approximately 20 minutes regardless of spec and battery size. The smaller battery can be charged via DC fast-charging at a maximum 140kW, and the larger at 168kW. Both max out at 11kW under AC charging.

The Spectre is rated at 520km on the WLTP scale, but Rolls claims it can do a lot better (like 600km). Efficiency is claimed to be 21.5kWh per 100km.

We drove 210km and had 300km of indicated range left at the end, which is pretty close to the claim.

The Spectre can be charged at up to 200kW on a DC fast charger, on which it will take 35 minutes to go from 10 to 80 per cent charge.

On an 11kWh home system it will take 10 hours and 45 minutes to go from zero to 90 per cent charge.

The Leapmotor B10 was developed with testing at Stellantis’ European proving ground in Italy. This is because despite Leapmotor being its own brand within China, its international operations are a joint-venture between itself and Stellantis.

There are some on-paper shreds of evidence for this, a rear-wheel drive layout and a claimed 50/50 weight distribution help, but get the B10 on the road and it’s clear this isn’t a car that’s relying entirely on price, a long list of features and some showroom shine to sell.

After the initial familiarisation that comes with many new electric cars, particularly from China, the Leapmotor B10 becomes easy to settle into a rhythm with, especially if you turn off some of its more intrusive ADAS features like lane-keep, driver monitoring and speed limit warning. The latter can sometimes get a limit wrong, and though the B10’s chimes aren’t audibly overbearing, they are persistent.

While the B10 doesn’t excel in any areas on the road, it doesn’t fall down significantly in any either.

Its suspension soaks up bumps relatively well, and despite some vibrations on rougher roads the B10 is pretty comfortable. The tyres it rides on as standard, however, are rather noisy, so if there’s an opportunity to swap out the Linglong defaults to something better, we’d advise it.

The tyres also squeal rather quickly when cornering, not necessarily because the B10 is about to let go, but just because the weight of the car appears to be pushing on the front outside tyre in cornering.

The B10 holds up better than\ a family car really needs to in dynamic driving, but we wouldn’t be doing mountain runs or track days in one. 

There’s a little body roll in corners, but not nearly as much as has been in other models riding on the apparently soft suspension preferred in China.

The steering, braking and acceleration all have a mild vagueness to them, but once you’re honed in they’re all predictable. The steering can be adjusted for weight, and its lightest setting is too light, while the acceleration feels lethargic in its lowest setting and too aggressive in its highest.

There’s not a lot of regenerative braking strength, but it’s enough to help regulate speed once you’re used to how mildly it comes in - again, depending on your preferences and settings.

The good news here is that the B10 is easy to drive, and only very serious road bumps on fast corners unsettled it on test - the kind you’d expect to upset any car.

The short answer to this question is that the Spectre drives just like a Rolls-Royce, but that answer is deceptively simple, because, for an electric vehicle, that’s actually a hell of an achievement.

Most EVs do not feel like cars to drive - the electric Hyundai Kona is not much like a petrol one at all - but what Rolls set out to do with its first EV was to make a vehicle that feels, handles and accelerates just like one of its famous and fabulously over-powered combustion-engined Ghosts, Phantoms or Wraiths.

This meant it had to be “Silent”, which it nails with ease - and the important thing to remember here is that even its V12 cars were always incredibly quiet, unless you really misbehaved. And it had to be “Effortless”, another brand pillar. Again, nailed it, because a Roller has never bothered with things like shift paddles, Sports modes or even the option to do anything but stick it in D for Drive and go. 

The sensation Rolls owners demand is endless, otiose acceleration, particularly off the line, and the Spectre delivers this in a typical EV fashion, but also one that’s very familiar to anyone who’s driven a Ghost, for example. It’s just a sense of overwhelming, prole-crushing progress, and it’s magnificent. 

The third and final brand pillar is “Waftability” and despite all the weight that it’s carrying (imagine how far over three tonnes this thing would have gone if they didn’t build their cars out of aluminium), the Spectre rides with a kind of hovercraft air of being just above, or barely in touch with, the ground. Bumps are no longer your concern, sir.

As mentioned, Rolls could have chosen a limousine-style vehicle as its first EV, but it has made a driver’s car instead - no CEO will sit in the back of a coupe like the Spectre. So it had to deliver when it comes to being fun, or at least a little frisky at times, when driven. 

Again, quite incredibly, despite its mass and weight, it does reward enthusiastic driving and can carve up even relatively narrow winding roads with aplomb, displaying very little body roll or pitching. The steering is almost absurdly light - because it must be “effortless” - but there’s still enough feedback to keep you interested. 

Most of the time, of course, the essentially laid back aura of being in a Rolls-Royce will seep into your body and brain and you will simply cruise along, patting yourself on the back for being so rich and clever.

And now, with an EV option finally available, you can tell yourself you’re saving the planet as well (as long as you don’t think about the 28 other cars in your garage).

The Spectre has not been crash tested for ANCAP. Its safety offerings include adaptive cruise control, lane-change assist, lane departure with active steer, a reversing assistant - "to support with parking and long reverses, eg country lanes or driveways, Spectre will reverse the previous 200m driven" - and collision warning with active braking.

Rolls tell us the Spectre has "Four airbags (does not need more)". So that's good news.

The B10’s post-purchase prospects are generally solid, though Leapmotor’s six-year, 160,000km warranty is an area where it falls short of rivals which are offering longer, unlimited kilometre warranties.

The battery is covered for eight years or 180,000km, whichever comes first, which is pretty par for an EV.

Servicing is capped-price for the first eight years, with each service costing $370 on average. The eight-year span makes it pretty appealing, per 12-month interval or every 20,000km.

There are currently 20 dealers across the country, though more are coming, while Leapmotor also offers eight years of roadside service.

Now, I would assume you'd get a lifetime warranty at Rolls prices, but apparently you get only four years, but it is unlimited mileage.

The Spectre's battery is covered by a 10-year warranty.

An extended service and warranty package is "TBC".

Rolls also offers 24/7 roadside assistance, and if your battery goes flat the company will take your Spectre to the nearest charging station.

A "regional flying doctor" is on standby 24/7 in extreme cases if Spectre “fails to proceed”.