Auto industry races to make ventilators
MICHIGAN: The automotive industry is offering its expertise and manpower to the hospital sector as it gears up to build mechanical ventilators during the coronavirus disease 2019 ( Covid- 19) pandemic, an initiative that is being met with some scepticism.
American auto manufacturers General Motors and Ford, French car companies PSA and Renault, and Formula 1 engineers have joined the ranks in response to a massive global shortage of the vital piece of medical equipment.
As hospitals around the world face a surge of patients with breathing difficulties from Covid-19, the scarcity of ventilators has forced doctors to make lifeordecisions.
Repurposing car factories for emergency production has drawn comparisons to World War 2, when they were used to build tanks and fighter planes.
But some experts say that in this situation, building critical care ventilators will require different techniques and procedures from what a car factory normally sees.
United States President Donald Trump used wartime economy analogies to justify his appeal to the automobile industry as the country grapples with a mounting number of Covid- 19 cases. He ultimately used a 1950s law concerning defence production to force one of General Motors’ plants to make ventilators.
In France, meanwhile, a consortium of industrial companies has been created — including PSA and automotive equipment supplier Valeo — to manufacture “10,000 ventilators by mid-May,” President Emmanuel Macron announced.
For its part, Mercedes has asked its Formula 1 team, which was idle due to postponed or canceled Grand Prix races, to get to work.
The six-time world champion team built a less-invasive respiratory device in order to reserve ventilators — which require breathing tubes and sedation — for the most severely affected patients.
The team says it could manufacture some 1,000 units a day with the help of six other United Kingdombased F1 teams, which have committed to help build the devices.
A version of the device — which increases air and oxygen flow into the lungs and is often used to treat sleep apnea — has already been used in hospitals in Italy and China to help Covid-19 patients.
The “Project Pitlane” mission takes advantage of “the core skills of the F1 industry: rapid design, prototype manufacture, test and skilled assembly,” Formula 1 said in a statement.
Some look sceptically on the car industry’s entry into the world of medical equipment, however.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit organization founded after the creation of the atomic bomb and which is known for its symbolic “Doomsday Clock,” said in a recent article that car manufacturers are not best placed for assembling medical equipment.
“Ventilators might resemble the pumps and air conditioners used in automobiles, but few automakers build their own — they buy them from specialized producers,” the group pointed out.