On Monday, at Miami Design Week, the British heritage automaker revealed the result of that creative brief—an electric four-door GT concept car named Type 00. The car’s design breaks with traditional trimmings, like a rear windshield and the brand’s long-standing “leaper” hood ornament. It’s an unconventional design for a company that is looking to reinvent itself, wholesale.

The morning after the colorful reveal, Fast Company sat down with Richard Stevens, Jaguar’s director of design, to chat about Jaguar’s plans to go all-in on EVs by 2030, as well as the unexpected reaction to the marketing campaign that got the world talking.

Please resolve the mystery: The “Copy Nothing” campaign features people in futuristic, colorful couture walking a lunar surface, but there’s no car. What was the vision behind it?

We knew we needed to decouple the brand from the product. From the outset, it was about creating clear space so that people had a true sense of what we were trying to do, as well as an emotional response, positive or negative, to a brand transformation. If we had shown a car, everyone would have been talking about that. But the brand is the thing that informs all of the products and the experience going forward, so we needed to give that the space it deserved. We knew that once we presented Type 00 in Miami, it would complete the picture. I think if we had shown the product in the teaser, it would have created noise in the automotive world, but not beyond it.

Were you expecting such a polarizing response?

I don’t know whether we realized that it would create such a response. But positive or negative, it’s not a bad thing. The challenge for us is that two weeks is a long time when there’s a huge amount of people around the world talking about it, but we were always confident that Type 00 would bring the full context, which will come through in all of the vehicles that you’ll see from Jaguar going forward.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X: “Do you sell cars?” How much attention did that garner for Jaguar?

I mean, he knows that we know how to design cars. But all of those comments just supported the fact that people were having an emotional response. And if everything that we’ve done with the reimagination of Jaguar has been linked to art and emotional connection, we took real pride in those responses.

For us in the U.K., the best thing that happened was that the politician Nigel Farage—he’s friends with Trump—posted that he was very angry about it. That was probably the best thing that ever happened. More than Musk, it was really about the frustration of people jumping to a conclusion without understanding the full picture. Now that we’ve shown the car, whether they love it or hate it, they won’t argue with why we’ve done what we’ve done.

Jaguar has culled its lineup to just one model in the U.S., the F-Pace SUV and, for the first time in its history, stopped selling any vehicles at all in the U.K. Are you worried that stepping away from the industry will hurt the brand?

It’s required for a fundamental reset because when we come to market with the new products, we can’t have a world where we’re showing something that is retrospective with something that needs that clear space.

You’re no stranger to reinvention. Jaguar’s Land Rover sister brand discontinued its beloved Defender 4×4 eight years ago to relaunch it as a modern SUV. Does the Type 00 take a page from that playbook?

We have confidence because of what we did with Defender. There was a huge amount of emotion around the original, and when we changed that, people said, “It’s not like the old one. I can’t love it,” but now people have fallen in love with it. With the Type 00, it might be that people quite like it later or they might not like it at all, and that’s okay. It comes back to people’s emotional connection to art. You can’t rationalize why you fall in love with art. We don’t all like all art.

Are you concerned about losing your core customers?

Jaguar is not about being loved by everyone. The campaign was more about getting people to understand that everything is changing. We’re not just redesigning the car. You know, the people who love Jaguar for what it was are not the audience that are going to enable Jaguar to move forward.