Meet the People Awards winners
Slate Auto’s head of design reflects on what it meant to win two categories at the People Awards in 2025
With entries flowing in for the 2026 People Awards, we felt it would be nice to catch up with past winners and see what it meant to them and their team.
Slate Auto took home a couple of prizes for Most Sustainable Team — sponsored by Bridge of Weir and Challenging the Industry — sponsored by Bentley Motors. Not to mention multiple shortlistings beforehand.
Head of design Tisha Johnson travelled over to London in December 2025 to represent her wider team from Detroit. Visiting Johnson earlier this year, she explained that the awards were a recognition of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes, and a reflection of their focus on sustainability.
Car Design News: Tisha, you must have sore arms from the awards you took home last year. Have you recovered from that?
Tisha Johnson: I don’t know if you ever recover from a moment like that. It was so exciting for us at Slate and it was shared not only with the design team, but really as a complete group at Slate. We were all so excited about it.
CDN: One of your wins came for Most Sustainable Design Team. I wonder if that speaks to the way you are approaching vehicle design not just in terms of materiality, but in terms of durability, utility, ruggedness, ease of assembly and disassembly.
TJ: Yes, I sure think so. We’ve always thought about the vehicle in a very complete way, and of course there are some very obvious practices that are just inherently sustainable. The removal of a paint factory, as one example. This means we can have the colour in tool or embedded within the material itself, and that has so many benefits.
But then it goes from there. I really think one of the other greatest practices we have is that we are always designing for manufacturing from a reductive point of view: how can we keep this as simple with as few parts as possible? That is naturally going to become a sustainable model.
CDN: Yeah, and the truck been very well received from an exterior point of view too, which is nice for a commercial vehicle where aesthetics isn’t usually a priority. Was it fun coming up with that exterior design?
TJ: It was so fun. It was really fun and it was exciting for us as a team because we were taking it quite literally from words on paper to the actual expression — the vehicle, the brand — that we are making. And that is incredibly rewarding.
I think the energy we have about it, our excitement, our optimism, really comes through in the final outcome in the design itself. And we were also really quite intentional in making sure it was something that we could be proud of, and that people could be proud of. It was really about the customers, about people feeling like this is something that they are happy to own.
The 2026 People Awards is open for entries. Celebrate the teams and individuals behind the product with our easy-to-use online portal. Join your colleagues, heroes and potential partners by booking a table here.
