Living with a car for ten days tells you rather more about it than a few hours on a launch route. The initial excitement wears off, the buttons you thought were clever either become genuinely useful or completely forgotten, and you find out how a car fits into normal life rather than how it performs on somebody else’s carefully selected roads. That was especially interesting with the Lepas L8, not only because I had plenty of time to get to know it, but because my 27-year-old daughter, Gemma, drove it a lot, too. She came at it from a rather different perspective and, as it turned out, picked up on quite a few of the same things I did.
There’s another reason the L8 is interesting. Lepas is a completely new name in the UK – part of the Chery group alongside Omoda, Jaecoo and Chery itself – and this is a car that has to persuade people to take notice of it.
