PARIS, April 1, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – The automotive industry is offering its
expertise and manpower to the hospital sector as it gears up to build
mechanical ventilators during the coronavirus 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 life-or-death decisions.
Repurposing car factories for emergency production has drawn comparisons to
World War II, 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.
US President Donald Trump used wartime economy analogies to justify his
appeal to the automobile industry as the country grapples with a mounting
number of coronavirus cases. He ultimately used a 1950s law concerning
defence production to force one of GM’s 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 Tuesday.
For its part, Mercedes has asked its Formula 1 team, which was idle due to
postponed or cancelled 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 UK-based 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.
– Dependent on suppliers –
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 organisation 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
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.
“Facile images of Ford assembly lines building World War II bombers can
only get us so far in solving the ventilator problems of today,” the group
said.
But car manufacturers say they are up to the task.
Renault has put its “technocentre” outside of Paris, its largest research
and development centre in France, to work on developing a prototype using
state-of-the-art equipment such as 3D printers
In the world race to get ahead of the coronavirus, time is of the essence.
For Formula 1 and University College London engineers, “it took fewer than
100 hours from the initial meeting to production of the first device,” the
team said.
This may be a typical lead time in motor racing, but not necessarily in
other industries.