Local Heroes

Miguel Rodrigues, a native son of Maia, is passionate about cars—fast cars. In the first decade of the new millennium, Rodrigues designed and built a very fast, very sleek racecar. Of medium height, fit, with dark hair and mustache, a quick smile, and charmingly broken English, Rodrigues takes us to see the beautiful expanse of 1,700 hectares of land outside town, where, he explains, PlanIT Valley will be built. Dressed in blue jeans and a crisp, white shirt, he looks like he just stepped out of an ad for a sports car. Walking with him down the street in Maia is like walking with a celebrity down Sunset Boulevard. Everyone knows him. And he knows everyone.

Rodrigues is a self-made man. He chose, he said proudly, not to go to university. "I created my own path," he told us, "my own network, my own company." That company built everything from sports stadiums to chemical plants to dams. "I never know what is going to happen when I leave my bed in the morning," he said with a shrug. But his fascination with classic cars only grew. Following a 20-year career as an entrepreneur in the global industrial construction industry, Rodrigues gave in to his passion and founded a small car company in Maia that renovated, displayed in its small "museum," and sold classic cars. The company designed and built a new racecar that debuted in July 2007 at the Historic Grand Prix of Porto.

The car caught the attention of Manuel Simas, then Microsoft's managing director for worldwide automotive. Simas, also a Portuguese native, was at the time based in Stuttgart, Germany, where he had been working for Microsoft on IT systems for Daimler's SmartCar division. He spent 30 years in the automotive industry, and SmartCar was his latest project. Simas—heavy set, outgoing, enthusiastic—seemed always on the lookout for the next big thing, the next deal. In the time we spent with him, he rarely drove the same car two days in a row. He was so often on the phone that when he was not midcall, the earphone wire hung, forlorn, over his shoulder. "I like to lead from the back," he said of his own leadership style. At Living PlanIT he was also fond of saying, "Our motto is Work hard, play harder."

Aware of rumors that Porto was considering electric vehicles (EVs) as part of a transportation plan for the future, Simas contacted Rodrigues and offered to meet him in Portugal. There he discovered that Rodrigues hoped to build electric vehicles with built-in intelligent technology and that the city of Porto was in the process of developing an ambitious new public transportation plan. Collaborating with engineers and professors at the University of Porto and MIT, government officials in Porto were intent on demonstrating state-of-the-art urban transportation that would use rapid advances in sensor technology to improve scheduling and minimize energy use.

Simas introduced Rodrigues to Peter van Manen, managing director at McLaren Electronic Systems and Simas's partner on the Formula One contract. Van Manen, an Australian, had lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Tall and soft-spoken, with round eyeglasses and deep technical smarts, van Manen recalled listening to Simas and thinking, quite early on, that something much bigger than an electric car factory might be possible. He agreed to help the two men develop a proposal for Porto.

Elegant, green-eyed, and with the courtly manners of another era, Celso Ferreira—born in Paredes in northern Portugal—attended university in Lisbon and worked there as a lawyer for a number of years. His father's unexpected death at a young age led Ferreira back home, leaving his Lisbon law practice to return to Paredes to run his father's furniture business. Then, in 2004, Ferreira decided to run for public office under the slogan Doing the right things, well. He was elected president of the Paredes municipality in 2005 and was reelected to a second four-year term in 2009, soundly beating four other opponents by garnering 58 percent of the vote. Ferreira made national headlines with his reelection by being the first candidate in Paredes to gain more than 20,000 votes, including candidates in presidential, legislative, and European Union elections.