Leap Motor A10 enters the 60,000 yuan price range. Cao Li: There is no such thing as selling cars at a loss; profit margins depend on the ability to control costs.

This article is sourced from Times Finance. Author: He Qing, Zhang Zhao

On March 26, Leapmotor officially launched its new A-platform first global model, the Leapmotor A10. The new vehicle is offered in four versions with two ranges—403 km and 505 km—with a launch guidance price of 65,800 to 86,800 yuan. Among them, the 505 km version equipped with a LiDAR is priced at 86,800 yuan.

                    Image source: Leapmotor

In an interview after the press conference, Cao Li, the Senior Vice President of Leapmotor, said: “For the 505 km LiDAR version, a price of over 80,000 yuan is already very appealing. Now, looking at the orders we see from the backend, the orders for the 505 km LiDAR version have already exceeded 53%. I think this price is very ‘impactful.’”

Regarding the impact of pricing on gross margin, Cao Li said: “Leapmotor’s costs and pricing have always been very transparent. Our goal is still to maintain a gross margin level of around 15% across the full lineup, so there is no question of selling cars at a loss.”

He believes that gross margin depends on Leapmotor’s ability to control costs. The share of internally developed and self-produced components is already over 65%. And as more new components move into volume production throughout this year, that proportion will keep getting higher. Leapmotor will have even greater advantages in scaling and cost control.

As a small SUV, the Leapmotor A10 faces many competitors in the small-car segment. According to Bitauto data, in 2025, the best-selling small SUV is Yuan UP (65,800 to 119,800 yuan), with sales reaching 189,000 units. In addition, there are models in the small-car segment such as Geely Xingyuan (68,800 to 98,800 yuan) and BYD Seagull (69,800 to 85,800 yuan). Their sales last year were 4.66 million and 3.11 million units, respectively.

In an interview, Zhu Jiangming, founder, chairman, and CEO of Leapmotor, discussed differentiated competition and said: “A10 is an SUV, while Xingyuan is a hatchback. If the overlap is high, it might be even more like BYD Yuan UP. But just like how people’s clothes always end up bumping into the same styles, because there are only so many specifications, every automaker basically has to make most of those specifications. There’s no such thing as someone trying to benchmark someone else. For Leapmotor’s C-series products, Geely and BYD will also have them. And for those (models) they have, Leapmotor has to fill in the gaps—that’s perfectly normal market behavior. It’s simply about how to find differentiation.”

Cao Li, meanwhile, said that in the development of small cars—including product definition—everyone is under pressure. Colleagues in the industry all know that small cars are actually very hard to make, because everything the car needs has to be there and none of it can be missing. “The question our team has been thinking about is how to make the quality of small cars higher and the configurations higher.”

In terms of the configuration of the Leapmotor A10, its key differences mainly lie in range and advanced driver-assistance.

The Leapmotor A10 is equipped with a 53 kWh battery pack in its class, and its CLTC-rated combined driving range reaches 505 km. Zhu Jiangming believes that the A10’s range improves by an entire tier compared with the previous traditional small cars. Previously, the focus was 300 km to 400 km; now it is 400 km to 500 km.

In advanced driver-assistance, Leapmotor has brought down features such as LiDAR and functions like from-lane-to-lane navigation-assisted driving to the 100,000-yuan class market. The Leapmotor A10 includes 27 high-precision perception hardware components, including a LiDAR, as well as a Qualcomm 8650 high-performance advanced driver-assistance chip.

Zhu Jiangming believes that with technological development, advanced driver-assistance software algorithms will become increasingly mature, including that advanced driver-assistance chips will become more widespread. It will definitely be rapidly scaled down and applied across all vehicle models.

Leapmotor states that its newly unveiled World Model advanced driver-assistance system uses a differentiated technology roadmap and can achieve world model capability without relying on high-end computing power.

The Qualcomm 8650 chip installed in the Leapmotor A10 has a computing power of 200 TOPS. At present, some automakers have already mounted chips with over 700 TOPS of computing power, or even higher.

Zhu Jiangming explains: “Purely for advanced driver-assistance, you probably don’t need such a big model or that much computing power.” He believes that there is a misconception right now—namely, that the bigger the model, the better, and the more complete the functions, the better; or that if you build a foundation model, you should turn the vehicle into an embodied intelligent robot. The future trend might be that. But if it’s only about making the car basically usable for the task of driving with advanced driver-assistance, computing power like that of the 8650 chip is already sufficient.

Amid intensifying competition in the new energy vehicle market, small cars, thanks to their people-friendly prices and broad audience base, have become a key support point for many automakers to leverage to drive sales growth. Last year, Geely Xingyuan, with sales exceeding 4.6 million units, was not only the sales leader in the small-car market, but also the top model in terms of full-year sales in 2025. Earlier, Leapmotor’s Leapmotor T03 also helped it secure a position in the entry-level new energy market.

The “volume-selling” attribute of small cars may help automakers quickly grow their sales scale. This year, Leapmotor’s sales target is 1 million units. Cao Li said: “We are absolutely confident in achieving this sales target.”

He also said: “How many units the A10 can sell in a month depends on what production capacity our factory can actually achieve. I hope it can reach more than 20,000 to 30,000 units.”

In addition to the A10, Leapmotor has planned an A05 model in its A-series lineup, also targeting the small-car market. In March this year, it already appeared in the application catalog submitted to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

“Right now, the monthly upper limit for a factory is just over 30,000 units. So when the A10 and the A05 go into volume at the same time, I’m very worried that one factory won’t be able to handle it. That’s why the number of units we can sell per month depends on the pace of production capacity ramp-up,” Cao Li said.