One is a maker of luxury cars with a brand cache valued by rappers and A-list celebrities, the other is a “meh!”. One takes pride in making cars from real metal, the other scrimps and scrapes on every mechanical part with every conceivable cost cutting measures the accountants will allow. One is a Mercedes GLA the other is a Renault “meh!”. However the two share exterior design similarities with one another both are aimed at entirely different sectors. One fills a niche the other, well we don’t know what its for but people are stupid enough to buy one. The Mercedes GLA is a compact luxury crossover SUV, we think it looks great. Renault also decided that the GLA looked great, so we presume they held a gun to the head of its car designers and ordered them to make it look “meh!” more like the GLA. We are of course hypothesizing a bizarre scenario and our legal department has instructed us to add that Renault does not hold guns to its employees heads. With the legal bit out of the way we are suspicious of the “meh!” in a way the French population were not during WW2. The “meh!” its a small family car but damn it looks so much like the GLA especially from the side view. Its almost as if the two companies are joined at the hip design wise. Bizarrely both Renault and Mercedes are kind of joined together, they call it a joint-alliance, sharing costs and improving time scales. We call it a classic face-palm moment, oh god its not going to work. Maybe the two companies are sharing a little too much design philosophies if the GLA and “meh!” are anything to go by. Let’s hope Mercedes don’t share any of Renault’s tight-arse cost cutting philosophies where every component is made as cheap as possible thereby resulting in crapola. Having said that Mercedes are already marching in Renault’s direction, the era of over-engineered Mercedes ended about 10 years ago. Now Mercedes produces so many different cars they really are going to have to “do a Renault” to keep all those costs down.