Mercedes GLA’s conservative tweaks

Mercedes has tinkered with its smallest SUV, the GLA, but it hasn’t really done anything significant to improve the car’s appeal

The new Mercedes-Benz GLA is akin to a slightly raised-up Mercedes A-Class, rather than an out-and-out SUV impersonator

Compact SUVs are big business nowadays, but that very two-word description of these machines can apply to a wide variety of vehicles, giving buyers a huge amount of choice across a vast range of price points. As ever, though, prefacing ‘compact SUVs’ with the word ‘premium’ clarifies the issue somewhat, simply by making people almost automatically think of the German big three: Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

All of these companies have at least ...