Eduardo Barreiros, the Spanish genius who managed to mobilize the world

In a Spain marked by the post-war period, the few standing trucks were powered by gasoline, a costly and scarce resource for the time. In this scenario, a brilliant mind decided to break new ground: Educardo Barreiros took gasoline engines and transformed them to operate on diesel. An engineering feat that propelled the world forward.

Don Eduardo was a tireless inventor who knew the engine world like no one else. He grew up in his native Galicia, working from a very young age on his father’s bus line. He opened a small workshop for the reconstruction and adaptation of the bodywork of the family buses.

At the age of 26 he founded BECOSA for road construction, where he also began to manufacture ingenious machinery to speed up the works. It was there, faced with the need to move its own trucks, that in 1949 it began the transformation from gasoline to diesel engines.

The first modified engine was called EB-1 (Eduardo Barreiros 1). It employed a process he called “dieselization,” in which the power and speed of the original engine were retained.
The conversion was affordable, at only 25% of the cost of a Perkins diesel engine. Orders poured in from every corner of the country.

Commercial success led him to found “BARREIROS DIÉSEL”, to manufacture his own diesel engines and trucks. This company was the third largest in Spain. Its engines powered more than 27 countries. The King of Arabia himself visited his factory and the Chrysler company partnered with him. The New York Times recognized him as one of the six outstanding industrialists in Europe.

This Spanish businessman of extraordinary intellect succeeded in multiple areas of expertise. He was a formidable human leader. He possessed prodigious mechanical intuition and unsurpassed spatial vision beyond any mathematical calculation.

…And with his strategic and innovative approach, he built an automotive emporium that revolutionized transportation in Spain and the world.