The short but vibrant life of Britain’s Pininfarina

Somewhere in the Sussex town of Worthing sits a grey business estate, the likes of which can be found anywhere in the country.

Yet it was right here that many of the beloved cars and wild motor show concepts of the 1980s and 1990s were designed by a creative agency the equal of Italy’s iconic carrozzerie.

International Automotive Design (IAD) was founded in 1976 by John Shute, who had been working as an engineer for General Motors’ Holden division out in Australia.

His firm first came to Autocar’s attention at the 1980 British motor show, where it displayed its idea for bringing Triumph’s ageing TR7 sports car into the new era, and by which point it already had 160 staff.

Six years later, we headed down to the Worthing Technical Centre, IAD having turned over £13.5 million and proudly received the Queen’s Award to Industry. It was already a global operation by then (and at its peak it would have offices in France, Germany, Spain, Japan and the US).

More than 37 big-name clients were on its books, including BMW, Ford, Land Rover, Lotus, Porsche, Saab and Volvo. It’s just a real shame that, with a few exceptions, we still don’t know exactly which of their icons IAD contributed to.

“Shute likes his clients to sleep easy and has devised a system that would be more at home in Fort Knox than a design studio,” we explained. “Only those with a properly coded key card have access to a project. 

It means for the duration of that job, which could last for months or years, the people assigned to it are the only ones able to see it.” 

“That’s the way it has to be,” Shute told us, being “conscious that one slip could blow the whole business and stampede an already nervous collection of clients”.

“The facilities available to clients are very wide,” we continued. “IAD began by taking ‘overflow’ projects from the big manufacturers who were disinclined to hire specialist staff for certain short-term design tasks.