At its 2026 Technology Day in Huzhou, Zhejiang, Leapmotor founder and CEO Zhu Jiangming framed the company's ambition in consumer-tech terms: winning not by inventing technologies but by integrating them into products and an ecosystem people love, the way Apple reshaped the phone industry. The clearest expression of that thinking will be a second brand, which he said will be revealed and begin handing over cars in the final quarter of 2027.
The new brand's debut model will be the first vehicle on Leapmotor's freshly announced LEAP 5.0 architecture. Zhu argued that today's EVs still borrow too much from gasoline cars in styling and cabin layout, and he wants the model to mark a break as decisive as the shift from feature phones to smartphones — a vehicle conceived as a living space on wheels.
On the technical side, LEAP 5.0 relocates the powertrain to the rear and swaps the conventional HVAC unit for an integrated air-conditioning module, a packaging change Leapmotor says frees up more than 19% extra cabin room. It is paired with the Clover 5.0 centralized electrical architecture, a 48V power system, in-vehicle Ethernet and a cloud-connected Agent OS. The company also showed its new LWM world-model driver-assistance stack, which abandons bird's-eye-view perception and treats LiDAR purely as a safety fallback; all 350,000 LiDAR-equipped vehicles delivered through August will get it free, for life.
Elsewhere, the CTC 3.0 cell-to-chassis technology folds the low-voltage battery into the main pack to eliminate the lead-acid unit, and Leapmotor plans to open-source it to rivals. The new MM-i hybrid drive, spanning nine series-and-parallel modes, adds plug-in hybrids to a lineup previously limited to BEVs and EREVs. Zhu was more reserved about robotics: the company has built a robot in-house but is spending cautiously while it hunts for applications that actually generate revenue. Volumes remain strong — August deliveries hit 103,129, up 80.72% year on year, leaving Leapmotor at roughly 56% of its million-unit annual target after eight months.