What makes a design icon? Audi TT, Fiat Panda and Jaguar XJ13 offer some clues

What makes a design icon? Is it commercial success, cultural significance, technical innovation or simply the ability to stir an emotional response? At Car Design Dialogues Detroit, Derek Jenkins chief creative officer at Lucid, Tesla's senior Vehicle Design manager Ian Kettle and Jonathan Szczupak senior director of Exterior Design at Rivian were invited to choose a design that had shaped their thinking and explain why it mattered.

Opening the conversation, Car Design News editor-in-chief James McLachlan offered an unconventional choice: The Forces of the Curve, a work by Italian futurist artist Tullio Crali. Created during the early machine age, the painting attempts to capture the sensation of speed rather than depict a vehicle itself.

For McLachlan, it represented the optimism that once surrounded the automobile and its promise of personal freedom and progress. That optimism, he suggested, is harder to locate today.

"You have to be optimistic about what design can bring," countered Ian Kettle. "Our very jobs are about creating new products and therefore for a new world. And if it's always negative, it's always looking backwards, that's not the way to be as a designer."

Jonathan Szczupak agreed, drawing parallels between the arrival of the automobile and today's transition to electrification. "Change is difficult for people. And I think it's our job as designers to just keep moving forwards." The challenge is that designers must anticipate a world that may look very different by the time their products reach customers.

Derek Jenkins suggested this has become increasingly difficult. Earlier in his career, competitive benchmarking offered a relatively predictable path. Today, changing cultural attitudes and polarisation make the future considerably less certain.

"Design taste is a reflection of society, right, of cultures," he observed. "You really have to project out a lot of different scenarios to be, I guess, kind of on target."

Kettle offered a provocative measure of originality. If a freshly milled clay model is immediately loved by everyone in the studio, perhaps the designers have not pushed far enough.

"To do anything truly new is to be ridiculed and is to be on your own out there," he said, recalling a lecture by fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

Audi TT: the power of restraint

For Jenkins, the first-generation Audi TT embodies the ability to create something simultaneously familiar and radically new.

Developed during the early 1990s, the TT emerged amid a wave of automotive nostalgia that also produced the Mazda MX-5, Dodge Viper and Volkswagen New Beetle.

Yet Jenkins argued that the Audi achieved something different. "Of course, it is retrospective, but it's not mimicking a specific car per se," he explained. "It's obviously influenced by kind of a '50s style as well as a pre-war style, but it's completely modern."

Jenkins had a personal connection to the project. He joined Audi in 1994, travelling to Europe alongside Freeman Thomas to work under J Mays. While Thomas developed the TT, Jenkins was assigned the more technically demanding Audi A2.

"I got the science project, which was the Audi A2, which I was always super jealous of," he recalled. Nevertheless, Jenkins recognised the significance of the TT and the designers responsible for it, including Thomas, Martin Longmore and interior designer Romulus Rost.

The TT's use of genuine metal interior components represented a significant advance in perceived quality and helped establish the craftsmanship that would become central to Audi's identity.

Its greatest achievement, however, was its clarity. "It's that honest and pure," said Jenkins. "And that's insanely difficult to do." Szczupak agreed, arguing that the TT demonstrated a quality shared by the most enduring designs.

"It had a point of view. It knew what it wanted to be," he said. "I think that's why it still looks so great today, because it's not overly styled. It's just a pure statement."

Fiat Panda: design for everyone

Kettle's choice could hardly have been more different. Where the TT demonstrated the power of visual purity in a premium sports car, the original Fiat Panda showed how intelligent design could transform an inexpensive everyday object.

For Kettle, the Panda remains an extraordinary example of achieving character and functionality within severe financial and manufacturing constraints.

"They just represent what you can do, like, in terms of good design when you don't have a huge budget, when you do have very tight constraints, and yet still create something that is super identifiable, super iconic," he explained.

Rather than attempting to imitate more expensive vehicles, the Panda embraced its limitations. Flat glass, straightforward construction and ingenious interior solutions became defining characteristics.

"So often when designing, like, cheap objects or value-for-money objects, people try and make it feel like a luxury object, but then take stuff away," Kettle observed. "Whereas here it really embraces its core philosophy and its core purpose."

He also challenged the assumption that the Panda's apparently simple geometry required little sophistication.

"Get the orthographic side view of that car and study the lines. Like, really study them," he advised younger designers. "Don't just assume they're straight lines."

For Kettle, the Panda represents modernism properly understood: a coherent relationship between purpose, materials, manufacturing and appearance.

Szczupak highlighted the ingenuity of its interior, while Jenkins suggested the Panda was sometimes overshadowed by the Volkswagen Golf despite achieving comparable design clarity under even tighter constraints.

Jaguar XJ13: an emotional connection

Szczupak's selection was the Jaguar XJ13, the extraordinary mid-engined racing prototype developed during the 1960s.

His attachment was deeply personal. His father worked at Jaguar, and a childhood encounter with the car at a factory event helped inspire his career.

"You could hear it a mile away, just revving," he recalled. "It started driving through the crowd and everybody moved out of the way and it stopped like right in front of me."

He was approximately ten years old. "I was like, what is this? And how can I do this for the rest of my life?"

Years later, studying automotive design at ArtCenter, he began to understand what made the XJ13 so remarkable. Its appeal lay in the relationship between aerodynamic efficiency, sculptural form and proportion, rather than decorative surface treatment.

"It's so hard to draw or photograph or sculpt because it's just, it's all form," he explained.

Szczupak argued that contemporary designers sometimes become distracted by surface detailing at the expense of the fundamentals. "If the proportions aren't right, the wheels aren't the right size, the wheelbase isn't right, like it just falls apart."

The XJ13, designed by Malcolm Sayer, demonstrated how technical understanding and aesthetic judgement could produce something exceptional.

The courage to create an icon

As the discussion concluded, the panel considered the relationship between originality and commercial success. McLachlan recalled being told that many of his favourite cars had been commercial failures, raising the possibility that an unsuccessful but ambitious design might achieve iconic status more readily than a successful mainstream product.

Kettle offered a more pragmatic perspective. Designers naturally gravitate towards the avant-garde, but much of their professional responsibility involves creating products with broad appeal.

Recalling advice from an early mentor, he compared experimental design with African jazz and mainstream commercial design with Taylor Swift. "Every designer wants to do the far out stuff," he said. "And sometimes you're lucky to work on programs that do that, but often you're being asked to design something that sells millions of units."

The Panda offered proof that commercial accessibility and design excellence need not be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the three selections demonstrated that iconicity has little to do with price, performance or even sales figures. The TT, Panda and XJ13 emerged from entirely different briefs, yet each possessed a clarity of purpose that transcended its original moment.

Perhaps that is the defining quality of an icon: a design so confident in what it wants to achieve that, decades later, it still has something to teach the next generation.