The automotive industry’s top notch players have offered to contribute through lending their expertise and resources to the health sector by manufacturing ventilators.
The initiative is being seen with skepticism as repurposing car factories for emergency production has drawn comparisons to World War II, when they were used to build tanks and fighter planes.
American auto manufacturers General Motors and Ford, French car companies PSA and Renault, and Formula 1 engineers have also responded in affirmative to the offer cover to the massive global shortage of the vital life saving equipment.
Experts are also saying that building critical care ventilators in this situation will require precise techniques and procedures which is different from what a car factory normally sees.
In his most recent address to the nation, US President Donald Trump used wartime economy analogies to justify his appeal – precisely using a 1950s law concerning defence production to force one of GM’s plants to make ventilators – as the country grapples with a mounting number of coronavirus cases.
A consortium of industrial companies has been created — including PSA and automotive equipment supplier Valeo — in France, to manufacture 10,000 ventilators by mid-May. Mercedes has also asked its Formula 1 team, which was idle due to postponed or cancelled Grand Prix races, to get to work.
The six-time worldhampion team built a less-invasive respiratory device in order to reserve ventilators — which require breathing tubes and sedation — for the most severely affected patients.
Another reason to look sceptically on the car industry’s entry into the world of medical equipment is explained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit organisation founded after the creation of the atomic bomb and which is known for its symbolic “Doomsday Clock”. The bulletin 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 specialised producers,” the group pointed out.
While carmakers have under-utilised production capacity at the moment, they are still dependent on suppliers who are often overseas, at a moment when supply chains have nearly ground to a halt, it said in its report.
