Leapmotor founder Zhu Jiangming sets new goal: from China's top new-force EV maker to global top three, aims to be 'Apple of auto industry'

At its 2026 Technology Day, Leapmotor voluntarily gave up the "number one" position—and declared it would go all out to "compete for third place."

Founder Zhu Jiangming used the term "new force" only once during the event, noting that "Leapmotor's sales have long been at the forefront of the new forces." But when he actually cited rankings, he switched frames of reference: "Among domestic new energy vehicle brands, we aim for the top three; among global new energy vehicle brands, the top four."

The qualifier before "number one" was "new force"—typically referring to companies founded around 2015 that brought internet thinking to car manufacturing. Leapmotor had held that top spot almost continuously since May 2025. In the past two months, monthly deliveries have exceeded 100,000 units; August deliveries reached 103,000 units, up 80.7% year-on-year.

The qualifier before "third place" shifted to "global new energy brands." From January to August this year, Leapmotor delivered over 560,000 units cumulatively, 130,000 of which were sold overseas. On the August domestic new energy brand retail ranking, it placed behind BYD and Geely; globally, only Tesla stood ahead.

The same delivery volume, measured by different yardsticks, tells a different story.

Changing tables means the problems a company must solve also escalate:

Over the past decade, Leapmotor answered the question of how to build a car that is both good and affordable. Now it must answer: What will it take to compete with global automakers? And the decisive factors in this competition often lie not on the surface, but hidden out of sight.

An Atypical New Force

Founded in 2015, Leapmotor is a distinctly "atypical new energy vehicle startup."

Zhu Jiangming has long emphasized that "an electric vehicle is an electronic product composed of 70% electronic components." While less glamorous than Elon Musk's "four-wheeled robot" theory, it captures the starting point for all "new force" automakers a decade ago: recognizing the long-term opportunity presented by "electronics replacing mechanics."

However, in terms of specific brand strategy, Leapmotor differs significantly from the other three star companies of its era—NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto. Or rather, compared to peers from the internet industry, Leapmotor had virtually no concept of "to C" (consumer-facing) at its founding.

Before founding Leapmotor, Zhu Jiangming spent over 30 years in the electronics industry. He was highly experienced in optimizing a product by taking it apart, but had little experience or strategy for how to market it once assembled.

Now, more than a decade later, Zhu still frequently emphasizes: Leapmotor's cars should be "good but not expensive," and "emotional value" is not the company's primary consideration.

As a result, this "new force" has continued the automotive industry's most fundamental logic: breaking down car manufacturing into a cost problem—delivering the same experience while using innovative methods in technology and management to minimize costs.

The first approach: Self-research and self-manufacturing. Currently, Leapmotor manufactures over 65% of its vehicle cost components in-house. In a recent podcast with Luo Yonghao, Zhu admitted that self-research and self-manufacturing can squeeze out roughly 10% of supplier profit margins. Even without aggressively pursuing profit at the vehicle level, this allows for a price advantage for consumers.

The second approach: Industrial clustering. This concept is borrowed from traditional automotive giant Toyota: Toyota's assembly plants and supporting parts suppliers are concentrated in Toyota City, minimizing logistics and costs. Most of Leapmotor's factories are currently concentrated in Huzhou and Yiwu, Zhejiang Province. The goal is to position high-transport-cost components within 5–10 kilometers of assembly plants, controlling logistics costs while improving operational efficiency across all production stages.

The third approach: Standardization. Since 2018, Leapmotor has used only three specifications of battery cells. Even as it targets one million units in sales this year, it still uses just three. According to Leapmotor, the average battery cell production line undergoes 5–7 changeovers per year, each causing downtime and yield fluctuations. With standardized specifications, production lines can run "365 days without stopping."

Viewed from this perspective, the important "to C" label of "good but not expensive" is not actually on the surface—it's hidden in places you can't see.

Three Changes Hidden Beneath the Shell

Leapmotor's technology day is an interesting offline space.

On one hand, Leapmotor likes to display components along the venue's circulation paths—from small items like headlights and seats to large ones like complete vehicle platforms and battery packs.

On the other hand, the "cost of understanding" for these displays is quite high. Based on my on-site observations, most of the serious discussion at the booths came from industry partners invited by Leapmotor. Media colleagues and car owners often found it difficult, within limited time, to grasp how these components—normally "hidden" inside the car shell—change the vehicle's structure and cost.

This is also a window into understanding Leapmotor's "technology philosophy": They don't care whether an innovation looks impressive enough at a launch event, like smart driving features. If it's useful for cost and architecture, they're happy to show it off.

Beyond the technology exhibition area, Leapmotor also likes to display this "engineer group photo wall" at its events.

At this launch, three "hidden-under-the-shell" changes caught my attention.

Change 1: Eliminating a Battery Used for a Century

For over a hundred years, whether in gas or electric cars, vehicles have carried an independent low-voltage auxiliary battery. Many people have encountered its problems: long-term parking can drain the battery or cause a "flat battery"; lead-acid batteries have short lifespans, often needing replacement every 1–2 years; and they occupy valuable front compartment space.

Leapmotor's solution is to replace the low-voltage system with cells of the same specification as the traction battery, integrated directly into the battery pack. According to Leapmotor's data, low-voltage usable capacity increases from 20 Ah to 146 Ah, and lifespan extends from just over two years to more than 10 years.

Change 2: Lowering the Price Barrier for High-Level Urban Smart Driving with a Smaller Team

Over the past two years, a common consensus in the smart driving industry has been: to do smart driving, you need to throw people and computing power at it. Leapmotor's smart driving team today numbers just over 800 people. Architecturally, it did not copy large language models by stacking network layers. According to Leapmotor, it achieves the same model performance using only one-fifth of the computing power.

The saved computing power translates into two things: First, high-level assisted driving is now available in the A10, starting at 65,800 RMB, with the top trim (including LiDAR) at 86,800 RMB. Second, 350,000 older vehicles equipped with LiDAR can receive free upgrades and lifetime free usage—the earliest batch of over 10,000 vehicles using the NVIDIA Orin platform alone required at least 50 million RMB for algorithm migration, amounting to roughly 5,000 RMB per vehicle.

Change 3: Rebuilding a Hybrid System

This is a technical framework specifically optimized for overseas markets.

At a strategy meeting in August last year, Leapmotor decided to pursue a direct-drive plug-in hybrid direction, judging that this technology still has a 5–10 year lifecycle globally. This judgment is somewhat contrarian domestically, where the share of range-extended and plug-in hybrids is being squeezed by pure electric vehicles. But overseas is a different story: charging infrastructure is far less dense than in China, and users' weekend travel distances are longer.

The technical breakthrough was chosen in the clutch. Existing hybrids commonly use wet clutches, which take over 400 milliseconds to engage. During high-speed, low-battery conditions, the drive motor may not intervene in time, leading to power loss. Leapmotor switched to an electromagnetic clutch, achieving 900 Nm of torque and reducing engagement time to 150 milliseconds. For the user, this means acceleration from 80–120 km/h takes just over 4 seconds, compared to the typical 8 seconds for同类 vehicles.

Overseas is indeed Leapmotor's fastest-growing segment right now: first-half exports reached 96,300 units, up 372.6% year-on-year, accounting for 27% of total deliveries. The first plug-in hybrid model is planned for overseas launch in the first half of 2027. A dedicated production line, costing over 100 million RMB, has already been built.

A battery, a clutch, a set of algorithms—these innovations initially face an awkward communication challenge. They are hidden inside the car shell, difficult to explain at a launch event, and hard for users to directly perceive.

But they ultimately deliver perceivable value to users in other ways: urban smart driving for under 100,000 RMB, a battery that goes from needing replacement every two years to being maintenance-free for 10 years, and a hybrid that accelerates from 80 to 120 km/h in just over 4 seconds instead of 8. This logic is what has brought Leapmotor to where it stands today.

"The Apple of the Automotive Industry"

In 2026, Leapmotor has set a target of one million units in sales. If achieved, it would undoubtedly be a perfect score that the entire auto industry would envy.

But this does not mask a systemic challenge facing Leapmotor and all automakers: the automotive market is slowing, and the domestic market is even experiencing negative growth. From January to August this year, domestic narrow-sense passenger car retail sales fell 20.8% year-on-year, and new energy retail sales also declined by 11%. What kind of innovation will drive consumer interest in the next phase of automotive development?

Interestingly, in previous years, the industry generally used software and smart driving as the biggest selling points for new cars. But starting mid-year, discussions represented by the "form factor changes" of the Xiaomi Pengcheng series seem to indicate a new consensus forming for the next phase of automotive innovation:

Automotive intelligence has never been limited to just the smart driving dimension. Just like "foldable screens," the automotive industry is also anticipating a revolution in hardware and product form itself.

Today's electric vehicles still follow many conventions from the internal combustion engine era in terms of system layout and component connections—the position of the engine compartment, the location of the air conditioning unit, the height of the floor—all legacies from a previous era.

Zhu Jiangming said at the launch that Leapmotor "aims to become the Apple of the automotive industry." Apple didn't invent communication, computers, touchscreens, or MP3 players. What Steve Jobs did was combine them. Leapmotor's newly released LEAP 5.0 does the same thing: moving the aforementioned deletions from the component level to the vehicle level.

First, move bulky items out. The air conditioning system is integrated into a single unit and moved out of the passenger cabin. Zhu used the analogy of early window-mounted air conditioners—the whole unit hangs on the wall, freeing up interior space. Combined with a rear-mounted powertrain, cabin length increases by 19%.

Next, expand space vertically. The floor is flattened and then lowered. The roof is replaced with an integrated, one-piece pop-up roof, extending upward by 800 mm—after parking, occupants can stand upright inside the car. This is a direction many automakers are now exploring.

Then, use an electronic architecture to support these new features. Once steer-by-wire chassis, active suspension, and variable space are introduced, the 12-volt system can no longer handle the load. So the entire vehicle switches to a 48-volt power supply.

The industry is converging in the same direction. Li Auto long ago defined the car as a "mobile home." When Xiaomi Pengcheng launched in July, its highlights were a flat floor, extra-long rails, and an electric pop-up tent. The difference is that most players create variable space through seats and interior trim; Leapmotor is modifying the powertrain, air conditioning, and roof.

Zhu Jiangming stated that Leapmotor's second brand is expected to be unveiled and delivered in the fourth quarter of 2027.

It took nearly a decade for foldable screens to go from concept to usable product. The real difficulty was not in software, but in re-engineering hinges, screens, and structural components one by one. The next round of form factor changes in automobiles will likely follow a similar path: when smart driving becomes a basic feature in every car, the next differentiator will return to product form itself. And changes to form cannot be caught up with via OTA—they must start from the architecture.

Between being the "number one new force" and reaching the global top three lies not a single technological advantage. BYD's foundation is vertical integration from the three electrics to the complete vehicle. Geely's foundation is platforms and scale. Tesla's foundation is using software to redefine hardware. The top positions on the leaderboard have always been earned by systems.

Leapmotor's approach is to push this system to its limits: smart driving, batteries, hybrids, vehicle architecture—all modified on the same blueprint simultaneously. The so-called "Apple of the automotive industry" is also about combination—and the prerequisite for combination is having all these pieces in your own hands.

The next wave of innovation in the automotive industry will likely not be determined by any single point technology in software or hardware. What the industry is searching for is a more holistic transformation.