If Mercedes-Benz cannot understand why its sales are floundering in China, perhaps the Vito Sport-X is the answer staring them in the face.

Celebrating 130 years of transportation, Mercedes-Benz Vans has apparently decided that the future of innovation lies in… stripes.

The Vito Sport-X is essentially a Vito SELECT wearing a motorsport costume: black trim, a splitter, spoiler, side skirts, 19-inch alloys and some aggressively optimistic badging. Inside, there are sport seats, suede, orange stitching, a heated steering wheel and wireless charging. Because nothing says technological progress quite like stitching.

Underneath it all is the same 190 PS 2.0-litre diesel and 9G-TRONIC automatic, producing 440 Nm and doing 0–62 mph in 10 seconds. Hardly the stuff of automotive revolution.

And this is where the irony becomes difficult to ignore. Mercedes is offering this £56,995-before-VAT van into a global market where Chinese manufacturers are throwing serious money at luxury, technology, electrification, intelligent cabins and genuinely inventive features. In China, £56,000-plus buys you considerably more than a commercial vehicle dressed up to look like it has just escaped from a boy-racer convention.

The Sport-X feels less like a new product and more like a shop-window mannequin: polished, accessorised and standing there proudly, while the interesting ideas are happening somewhere else.

The most depressing part isn’t that Mercedes has produced the Vito Sport-X. It’s that someone, somewhere, presumably sat around a table, looked at the brief and decided this was the answer: take an ageing formula, add some go-faster stripes, black wheels and a few lifestyle trinkets, then charge £56,995.

If this is Mercedes-Benz Vans’ vision of innovation, perhaps the Chinese competition doesn’t need to beat them.

Mercedes is doing the job for them.

And when you find yourself feeling embarrassed for a company rather than by it, you’ve reached a remarkably low point on the automotive shame scale.