The V edition of the Auto Awards culminated with the delivery of three prizes to personalities that the Observer chose to highlight for their contribution, in their respective areas of activity, towards more sustainable mobility solutions. The mayor of Cascais, Carlos Carreiras, received the award for Innovation; The CEO of Stellantis, Carlos Tavares, received the Leadership trophy, and the president and CEO of Toyota Caetano Portugal, José Ramos, was distinguished with the Recognition award.
This was the first time that the Auto Observer Awards were extended to the distinction of personalities, in addition to the models chosen by the public in the eight contest categories, and the newspaper considered that the challenging moment that the automotive industry is going through justifies rewarding merit of those who dare to risk For this reason, at the award ceremony, which you can review here, the difficult context that the automotive sector is going through, post-pandemic and dealing with the lack of semiconductors and failures in the supply chain were discussed. supply derived from the Russian invasion. in Ukraine. But there was also talk of those who face these difficulties and, above all, the challenges of the future of mobility with determination and with a different way of doing things. For the better.
Carlos Carreiras paved the way for buses that run on electricity generated on board through a hydrogen fuel cell. The leading municipality, the 5th largest in the country in terms of population, also stands out for having launched a pilot project for the production of hydrogen from urban waste. “Cascais has been making winning bets and this (hydrogen as fuel) is clearly one of them. We already have two buses and we have eight more on order. Hydrogen is very profitable, because what we save on fossil fuels is enough to buy another bus”, highlighted the mayor, who received the award from António Carrapatoso, one of the founders of Observador and president of the board of directors.
In turn, it fell to the general director of the Observer, Rudolf Gruner, to present the Recognition trophy. It was a last-minute unforeseen event that José Ramos was unable to travel, so this 75-year-old engineer was represented by Artur Passos, attached to the management of Toyota Caetano Portugal. José Ramos joined Salvador Caetano at the age of 22, in 1968, precisely the year that Toyota arrived in Portugal. He “inherited” the business from his mother-in-law and made it grow, from the North to the world. It should be noted that it was his idea to go to Japan to propose to Toyota to manufacture hydrogen buses here, in Vila Nova de Gaia, to make them one of the group’s growth anchors, whose most recent business gained “wings”. , providing Airbus.
José Manuel Fernandes, editor of Observador, presented the Director of Operations of Stellantis Portugal, Pablo Puey, with the Leadership Award for Carlos Tavares. The manager who leads the 4th largest automotive group in the world, by production volume, in the first year of Stellantis led the French-Italian-American consortium to record results, which were reflected in the distribution of 1,900 million euros to employees in 2022
Source: Observadora
