Driving support
The global auto industry has found ingenious ways of responding to the pandemic and coming to the aid of frontline workers battling the crisis
It has been a tumultuous first quarter for the luxury car industry. While 2020 began with carmakers preening ambitious plans for co-branded speed boats and luxury residences, in a matter of weeks they retooled their production lines to instead manufacture personal protective equipment (PPE) and machines to support the efforts to combat the Covid-19 virus.
Early in April, as the virus began to accelerate, Jaguar Land Rover started manufacturing 3D-printed visors at its Advanced Product Creation Centre in Gaydon. Those visors were dispatched to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
Towards the end of the month, JLR began to use new tooling from WHS Plastics that allowed it to scale up and manufacture up to 2,000 pieces a day of these vital PPE. It also deployed 362 vehicles to organisations in countries around the world from Austria and Australia to Brazil and Russia.
While Aston Martin’s share value has tumbled over 80 per cent since the start of the year, despite Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll agreeing to invest GBP182m ($224m) into the iconic car brand, it didn’t stop it from doing its bit for the pandemic. At its Gaydon plant, it repurposed machines that otherwise cut leather used in the interiors of its cars to instead cut silicone components to make intubation boxes to protect medical practitioners during the intubation and extubation process. It also manufactured protective visors and gowns that were cut on the premises too.
Less than 100 miles away, fellow British carmaker Bentley 3D-printed more than 30,000 face shields at its facility in Crewe while also donating other equipment like gloves, masks and safety glasses to healthcare workers.
Bentley, it must be noted, had an exceptionally strong performance in China in April as the coronavirus lockdown eased in the Asian country. “In one week in April, the order intake for us was greater than any individual month in the six months leading up to it,” Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark reportedly told BBC Radio 4.
Bentley’s parent company Volkswagen Group had an ingenious response to the crisis. At the Spanish headquarters of one of its car brands, SEAT, 150 employees were designated not to build cars, but ventilators, using the carmaker’s existing technology. The ventilators, which it called OxyGEN, were produced on the same line that otherwise manufactured the SEAT Leon and used windscreen wiper motors from the carmaker to perform the repetitive ventilating action required in these machines.
In another mainland European country particularly hard hit by the virus, Italy, supercar manufacturers were stepping up to the plate as well. At Lamborghini’s Sant’Agata Bolognese plant, the upholstery teams began using their sewing machines to produce 1,000 masks a day. Also within the company’s carbon fibre production department which manufactures lightweight components crucial to its supercars, nearly 200 3D-printed visors were being manufactured a day.
Ferrari meanwhile started using its factory at Maranello to manufacture respirator valves that are attached to masks worn by medical staff. In May, it went further and unveiled its very own pulmonary ventilator machine called the FI5.
The project was headed up by Simone Resta, the carmaker’s head of chassis engineering, and F1 innovation manager Corrado Onorato in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).
The FI5 gets its name from those involved in the project as well as the time taken to realise it: F stands for Ferrari, I is for IIT and 5 refers to the number of weeks it took to execute this project. IIT’s scientific director, Giorgio Metta said that partnering with Ferrari meant that they were able to tap engineers that had expertise in fluid dynamics which was necessary to develop a machine like the one they came up with.
“We started with some dynamic simulations aiming to simulate the ventilator in different conditions, and then we did basically most of the tricky modelling of the ventilator with all the components inside, the pneumatic and mechanical components, and then we gave our support in terms of supply chain and cost engineering. We also gave our support in manufacturing all the custom components in CNC [computer numerical control modelling],” said Onorato in a statement carried by the official Formula 1 website.
Formula 1 which hasn’t yet been able to commence its 2020 season meanwhile rallied seven of its UKbased teams – Haas, McLaren, Mercedes, Racing Point, Red Bull, Renault and Williams – to get together under an effort titled “Project Pitlane” and pool efforts to use their engineering expertise to find solutions which could aid the medical community.
Bentley, it must be noted, had an exceptionally strong performance in China in April as the coronavirus lockdown eased in the Asian country
These F1 teams participated in the VentilatorChallengeUK initiative that asked industrial, aerospace and automotive companies to find solutions to reverse engineer devices required by medics, as well as to scale production of other pieces of equipment for which the engineering was already known.
As a result, Mercedes F1 team and the University College of London teamed up to reverse engineer a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device in under 100 hours that would help patients on oxygen supply who needed a little extra assistance breathing. This device reportedly cuts the chances by half of the patients using one to subsequently require more invasive interventions like that of a ventilator.
Regionally, in April, engineers at the Bahrain International Circuit (BIC) announced that they had designed ventilators in just two weeks that could be used for non-ICU patients in need of respiratory assistance – and would share the blueprints for it globally for free.
The device was built from scratch in partnership along with intensive care doctors from the country’s Salmaniya Medical Complex’s Respiratory Therapy Department and Medical Equipment Department, and has already received approvals from Bahrain’s Ministry of Health.
Closer to home in the UAE, Audi Volkswagen Middle East said in April that it had provided several cars to the Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services to support its effort to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in the emirate.
The fleet of vehicles includes the Audi Q3, Q5 and Q8 as well as the Touareg, Teramont, Tiguan and Passat from Volkswagen – all of which are being used to transport critical equipment, medical supplies and meals to team workers and their families living in the UAE.
The use of these cars for supporting the ancillary activities of DCAS and its staff members, means that its ambulances can be dedicated for essential and emergency purposes.
Also in Dubai, Al Ghandi Auto, the exclusive retailer for General Motors-owned Cadillac vehicles in the UAE, donated 10 Escalades – with a dealer advertised price of Dhs376,000 each – to the Dubai Police to help the emirate’s security force combat the Covid-19 pandemic in April.
Apart from a self-starter initiative shown by various carmakers globally, it was also the government which actively stepped in to commission big-budget projects. In April, the US government invoked the Defense Production Act and contracted General Motors to manufacture 30,000 ventilators at a cost of $489.4m. GM, which repurposed an assembly line otherwise meant to produce precision auto components at its Indiana plant, partnered with Ventec Life Systems to build the ventilators priced at approximately $16,000 a piece, a price at which it says it does not make a profit.
Also under the Defense Production Act, Ford and General Electric were commissioned a $336m contract in April to build 50,000 ventilators at the carmaker’s plant in Michigan. Separately, Ford also partnered with 3M to build respirators. In May, Ford and 3M began to ship its first batch of respirators in which the airflow system used the automaker’s off-the-shelf components from the fans designed to cool the seats in a Ford F-150, a portable battery pack to power the respirator for up to eight hours and 3M’s advanced filtering systems to trap virus particles.
There have been a few controversies too, not least among them related to Tesla. The US carmaker did source 1,255 ventilators in March from China and flew them to Los Angeles, California, to distribute to hospitals that require it. But equally, Tesla also filed a lawsuit last month against Alameda County, California, demanding that state to lift the ban on opening up of businesses, a restriction that was put in place as part of the state’s Covid-19 precautionary measures.
Yet, there’s little doubt that from the UK to mainland Europe, Asia and the Middle East to the Americas, the overall sentiment within the car industry is to rally around a cause. Car sales will undoubtedly plummet globally in the near future as oil prices correct themselves, while the medical community makes frantic efforts to find a vaccine and global travel of any kind is reduced to a necessity. But these carmakers can also, quite rightly, assume that the goodwill created by their efforts now will not go unnoticed in an industry where consumer’s purchasing habits are particularly driven by emotions.