How the mighty are fallen..

That is disappointing. Car manufacturers should stop penny pinching and come up with something original instead of developing one vehicle together and sticking their own badges on.

IIRC Mercedes will be sticking Renault engines in some of the new A-class models.

They'll need to be mindful of what happened to Nissan in the early years of their partnership with Renault, namely, a noticable dip in their hard-won reputation for quality and reliability.

P.S. I don't really mind companies engaging in business partnerships to produce and sell cars, but why did M-B (who I really, really like) have to throw in their lot with the French (who I really, really don't like in general)

Wow i never noticed that before! just Looked and what gave it away was the megane steering wheel!

I don't mind this at all. MB has made some very basic commercial vehicles and small vans in the past and it does not seem to have dented their image, any more than making heavy lorries does.

To my mind, the Kangoo is an intelligently designed and attractive little car. Also, my Renaults have been completely reliable over six-figure mileages, so good luck to MB, I say.

I have no issue with MB making commercial vehicles.  Does nothing in my eyes to the detriment of the brand.  The Unimog is one of my all time favourite vehicles I think they are epic.

I don't have an issue with them doing commercial vehicles either, but I feel dissapointed that they haven't created something original.

While I can understand your argument, and it does bother me a-bit too (the fact that a company like Merc is going to sell something based on a Renault), I think Merc will do some modifications to differentiate it from the Kangoo.

Also, in the current economic climate, I don't think Merc had that much of a choice tbh. If you examine current car makers' 'relationships', you'll see that almost all of them are owned by another company/own a set of companies (e.g. VW) or are in some sort of joint alliance (e.g. Renault-Nissan, PSA etc.) to reduce costs - and even then some of the car makers are struggling. Now, Merc only own Smart...I think it's fairly reasonable they do some joint partnerships on a few of their models given that, for the rest of their model ranges (the more important ones), the vehicles are pretty much completely developed in-house. Thus, given that the partnership does not really affect Merc's core models, I do not a see a reason why you'd be glad not to own a Merc.