@expressmotoring You must think out of the box

AGREAT car design doesn’t need a long and drawn out explanation of which line is where and why.The car’s shape and style should speak for itself. I very much doubt that at the launch of the Jaguar E-Type in 1961 its designer spent half an hour telling the journalists why he’d made the bonnet so long and why the rear wheel arches were the shape they were.The car did the talking.

The designer who gave us a talk on this new Mercedes-Benz GLB had his work cut out to keep my attention.The explanation went on for some time but I’d already worked out the new Mercedes SUV’s styling features for myself: it is essentially a rectangle with rounded-off corners.A bit like Postman Pat’s van but a lot posher.

Mercedes showed a concept version of the GLB at the Shanghai motor show earlier this year.That car featured a selection of Tonka-like body kit parts and details that made the car look a lot more purposeful than it does now in production form.The GLB isn’t an ugly car, just extremely bland. Merc’s GLA, which is a smaller crossover, looks a lot better and that is far from being my favourite out of all the company’s cars.

Mercedes will point out that one of the chief selling points of the GLB is that it comes standard with seven seats.There is only one model that comes with just the five seats and that’s the GLB 220d 4Matic AMG Line Premium which is one of the more expensive versions. Mercedes will have done its research into this but I’m not so sure that seven seats are that useful and especially in this car.

Put the third row of seats up and you lose most of the useful luggage space and you’ll only be able to fit quite small children onto the seats themselves. I’ll wager than most GLB owners will rarely use the full septet of chairs.

You have three engines to choose from, four if you include the AMG version.

There’s a 1.3-litre 163bhp four-cylinder petrol engine that