Leapmotor’s tech day promised a second brand and a self-built robot, with a jab at being the ‘Apple of cars’
A carmaker that keeps pitching itself as the cheap one just showed a self-built robot and an operating system, and aimed a line at Apple. At its 16 September tech day in Huzhou, Leapmotor founder Zhu Jiangming said a second brand arrives next year with the feel of a smartphone replacing a feature phone, and that the company wants to become the Apple of the car industry. Leapmotor also revealed it has built a fully in-house robot.
Zhu’s bar for the robot is blunt: one that strolls is nothing, one that earns is the only kind worth showing. Leapmotor is hunting a landing scenario that actually pays, not a demo for the stage. The disclosure matters because it places the carmaker inside the same embodied-AI conversation occupying pure-play robotics firms.
The deeper move is LEAP 5.0. The new mobile-space architecture lifts cabin and legroom through repackaged hardware, and its headline is the Clover 5.0 central domain controller running a car-cloud Agent OS with 48-volt power and full-vehicle ethernet. That OS is described as a unified embodied-intelligence brain handling multimodal perception, memory of user habits and ecosystem decisions.
On driving, Leapmotor launched the LWM world model, trained in the cloud and on device, that fuses perception, planning and control into one output of steering and throttle. It says the system adapts to national roads and improves the more it drives, and that a world-model upgrade will reach 350,000 lidar-equipped owners in the first quarter of 2027. The CTC 3.0 cell-to-chassis battery, with its integrated high-low voltage design and 11-in-1 domain BMS, will be open-sourced.
The strategy is pure vertical integration. Leapmotor controls the architecture, the agent brain, the battery and now a robot, arguing that electronics are replacing mechanics in every part and each deserves a fresh design. A robot and an agent OS are the next step in owning the stack from chip intent to the driveway.
The following images show the LEAP 5.0 architecture, the central domain controller, the world model and the battery system presented at the event.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Chedongxi report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://chedongxi.com/p/376181.html.
Translated and adapted from Chedongxi (link).