Points for Style Design was always the substance of the Audi TT.

BRIAN MCCAULEY OWNS five Audi TTs. "It's a cool car. You don't see them very often." McCauley explains his affection and affliction. "It was 'the German Miata.' 'The hairdresser car.' 'It's just a Golf with a Beetle squished on top of it.'

- JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN

All these stupid things that people say." McCauley's husband, Dan Klaudt, chimes in: "It was the first Audi design I fell in love with." The TT was built to inspire passion, not to be an anonymous corpuscle in the traffic stream. It appeared when Audi was on the verge of extinction in America, announcing the company wasn't going without a fight. The car was distinctive and pugnacious, and it didn't look like anything else from the Nineties. It was the vanguard of a resurrection.

Destined to be one of the most beloved and respected designs of its time, the TT had nostalgic elements, but the overall theme was modern. Even avant-garde. It helped launch an industry-wide mania for retro style that would result in reborn Mini Coopers, Chevrolet Camaros, and Ford Thunderbirds, among many others. Is the first-generation TT a classic? Not yet. But maybe.

A quarter-century and three generations later, the TT heads into retirement, its job done. This small coupe and roadster imbued Audi with style and street cred, enough that it now sells vast numbers of engorged SUVS to people who sit on HOA boards. So its legacy is not all for the good.

"Audi had its issues," designer Freeman Thomas recalls of the time the TT was gestating. The company was desperate. In 1985, it sold 74,061 cars in the United States. But then, on November 23, 1986, CBS's 60 Minutes aired a segment titled "Out of Control," accusing Audi's flagship 5000 sedan of being prone to uncontrollable sudden acceleration. Sales collapsed and kept collapsing, down by roughly 33 percent in 1987 alone. By 1996, Audi sold only 27,279 cars here.

"But Audi was a tour de force of technology," Thomas continues. "It had Quattro. It had the A8, with its all-aluminum space frame, and it had Walter Röhrl and all that rally success. We were tasked with how to communicate this."