Icons are defined every generation. To create a definition worth having takes hard work, and sometimes risk. You don’t gain Icon status overnight, and you don’t gain icon status from staying safely in others shadow. This applies to car companies too; brand loyalty, bragging rights, and being true to the principles created can build sales figures.

Some companies have exhausted their loyalties, or live off of days gone by, a car created in another time by another group of engineers. Some companies build it, understand it, and keep it at all costs. I’m not going to name, names we all know, both winners and losers. There is no place in business, for old fashioned business mentality when your selling dreams, and image. Passion should drive business owners, not stock prices. Passion leads to direction, direction leads to goals, and goals lead to delivering on a product. Many have found ways to cut costs to get those quick gains. Costs cuts are not bad themselves but leaning on them to provide you a boost in revenue is a short term win long term loss. There are plenty of tools used by old mentality business without passion used time and time again. Companies, dependent on these practices find it hard in the future to survive.

Back to the point though, if you want to build an icon, that work, that investment, is in every generation. You need new clients and brand loyalty to win the long game. (Pictures here do not reflect the modern debate on this subject, just an older example of falling on old icons to make sales while cutting costs drastically.) K cars might have saved Chrysler in the short term but it took some wild ideas in the early 90s to rebuild their name and created a new icon in the process.

On its own not a horrible car. using an icons nameplate to sell it actually makes it worse.