Leapmotor Starts Building Cars in Spain Next Month, but UK Buyers Won’t See Them

Leapmotor starts building cars in Spain next month, but that won’t change a thing for UK buyers. They’ll keep getting cars shipped straight from China, and the reason comes down to simple economics. The UK doesn’t tax those imports, so there’s no financial case for routing Spanish built cars there instead.

The EU’s anti subsidy investigation into Chinese EVs sorted manufacturers into different tariff bands based on how much they cooperated, and Leapmotor landed in the middle as a cooperating manufacturer that wasn’t individually sampled, which puts it on a 20.7 percent additional duty on top of the standard 10 percent import tariff, about 30.7 percent total. Manufacturers judged uncooperative pay up to 35.3 percent on that same base. Building in Spain lets Leapmotor skip that cost entirely for European buyers. The UK charges nothing on the same cars shipped from China, so redirecting scarce Spanish output there would mean giving up guaranteed savings in the EU for no benefit at all, since a UK buyer pays the same price whether the car comes from China or from Spain. Leapmotor’s UK boss Damien Dally, speaking to Auto Express, confirmed that’s the logic behind the split, and left the door open to Spanish built cars eventually reaching Britain too, once there’s enough capacity to go around.

The Figueruelas plant starts with one model

Production begins at Stellantis’s Figueruelas plant near Zaragoza, which currently builds the Peugeot 208 and Lancia Ypsilon. The B10, Leapmotor’s best selling model in Britain, goes first, with an initial run of 40,000 cars a year. Leapmotor registered more than 48,000 vehicles across Europe in just the first half of this year, so that initial volume covers less than a year’s demand at the current pace. Three more models follow by 2027: the B05, the B03X and the B03.

For now, Figueruelas is mostly putting together parts shipped over from China rather than building cars from raw components. That’s expected to shift gradually as local suppliers catch up to the quality and delivery speed Leapmotor needs from them, which is exactly what’s happening around the plant already. A battery workshop near Figueruelas is opened in June to supply lithium iron phosphate packs for the B platform, rated at 65,000 modules a year with room to grow to 100,000. Spanish workers there trained in China before the line started. In Borja, a joint venture between China’s Duoli Technology and Basque supplier Fagor Ederlan began building B10 chassis in July.

Shipping got expensive too, not just the tariffs

Tariffs weren’t the only reason behind the move. Leapmotor’s European sales and marketing director, Francesco Giacalone, told Auto Express that shipping costs from China have climbed sharply over the past couple of years, as the war in the Middle East and other regional tensions have pushed ships onto longer, more expensive routes around Africa instead of through the Red Sea. That alone, he said, was reason enough to start planning European production before the tariffs made it unavoidable.

Giacalone also set two conditions before signing off on building in Europe. Quality had to match what Leapmotor already gets in China, and speed had to hold up too. In China, a new car goes from development to production in as little as 18 to 20 months, and he was clear that opening a plant somewhere else risks stretching that out to three years once the local supplier network gets involved, wiping out the advantage entirely. It’s a good reminder that building cars outside China isn’t just a matter of putting up a factory and hiring workers. Every supplier feeding that factory has to move at the same speed and hit the same tolerances, or the whole point of localising production falls apart. Leapmotor spent the past couple of years lining up a tier one supplier base in Europe that can work to Chinese specifications, which should make future models faster to bring online too. Leapmotor isn’t the only Chinese brand taking this route, and I’ve mapped out which other manufacturers are setting up production in Europe separately. Giacalone also mentioned Leapmotor is looking at buying Stellantis’s plant in Madrid, where the Citroën C4 and C4 X are currently built, so Figueruelas might not stay the only site for long.

Sadly, none of this changes anything for UK buyers. Continental momentum doesn’t cross the Channel. Leapmotor’s cars will keep arriving from China exactly as before, and if European built cars eventually do make it here, they’ll come at the same specification, the same quality standard and the same price as what’s already selling well.