Leapmotor could sacrifice Euro NCAP safety rating for a better driver experience

Ever feel like the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in new cars are more of a hindrance than a help because of how distracting, confusing or generally infuriating they can be? We do sometimes, and Leapmotor’s marketing boss would be inclined to agree, based on the thoughts he shared about ADAS in an interview with Auto Express.

Francesco Giacalone, Leapmotor’s head of European marketing and the man responsible for customer experience, told us he would be happy for the brand to sacrifice high Euro NCAP safety ratings – which are earned partly by companies cramming in as much as driver-assistance technology as possible into new cars – for the sake of a better, less stressful driver experience.

“Getting Euro NCAP ratings will not always be inexpensive and will not always be easy to achieve,” he said. “So at a point in time, there could be the compromise whether to not reach the [maximum] NCAP rating, but to provide the promise of our brand, which is to deliver life-easing technology at an affordable price.

“Maybe we need to sacrifice one star to deliver the right product to the customer, with the full content of useful and life-easing technology?” he added. “That could be the right choice.”

But to clarify, Giacalone isn’t proposing that Leapmotor starts putting less safety or driver-assistance tech into its cars. Especially because all new cars sold in the EU must be fitted with Emergency Lane Keep Assist, Autonomous Emergency Braking and Intelligent Speed Assist, and more systems will be added to this mandatory list next year. Instead, his suggestion is simply that the driver should be able to choose which of the systems onboard they want activated by default when they turn on their car. 

He explained: “Of course, we will not go to the extreme of the spectrum where we launch a car that has no active safety, and the passive safety is crap. All vehicles from Leapmotor are engineered with high-strength stainless steel on the side and in the frame, so the cabin is strong, and there’s lots of airbags.

“All those elements will be there. Just maybe, to achieve the five-star rating, you need some active safety which not all consumers equally appreciate,” he said. “Then, either you make a compromise in that little last mile and probably that will cost you a star – that could be the case – but there’s no compromise on the broad security of the car.”

Essentially, as Giacalone put it to us, “the message is that all the tech, hardware and software is there at the service of the customer. So, if you want, we enable it.”

The marketing boss would be the first to admit some parts of Leapmotor’s ADAS suite are not perfect, and still need work, which we very much agree with after driving the C10.  

However, unlike some other brands, Leapmotor is willing and able to update its cars extremely quickly after receiving feedback like ours. For instance, Giacalone told us, after receiving criticism about the C10’s driver-assistance systems and how difficult it was to turn them off last September, the company developed a solution in just six weeks and was ready to roll it out before Christmas. Now, the car has a drop-down control centre with shortcuts for deactivating certain functions much more quickly, and more easily than before. 

But while Leapmotor can update its cars incredibly quickly if and when it needs to, Giacalone thinks customers might find a major update every six weeks a bit annoying. Instead, he said: “We will try to have regular updates every four months or so, maybe once or twice a year, grouping more improvements and new features.”

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