Let it never be said that when it comes to engineering, I do not know what I am talking about.

On the same day that I wrote my post Am I the only one who as ever worked in a factory?  Wired published this article:

How does a car company make a ventilator?
The government wants an army of manufacturers to assemble thousands of ventilators in the war against the coronavirus. But you can’t just swap cars for medical devices

The answer to their titular question is: they can’t, not easily at least.

Designing and manufacturing a ventilator is in no way a simple process, and some ventilator manufacturers are sceptical that car manufacturers will be able to make them at all. Jens Hallek, CEO at leading ventilator manufacturer Hamilton Medical, explains that the materials and the components needed to build a ventilator are “highly specific” and require “specialised know-how.”

“These are extremely sensitive machines with not only a lot of hardware, but also a lot of software. If one of the components does not work correctly, the whole machine shuts down and cannot be used anymore,” Hallek adds.

“I think the idea of automotive manufacturers or indeed any manufacturer that is not well-versed in the production of medical devices somehow quickly retooling and making an alternative product is very naïve,” says Nick Oliver, automotive industry expert and management professor at the University of Edinburgh.

“There is no product that I can think of in the automotive industry that has to move air and oxygen around in a similar way to a ventilator.”

It typically takes around three years to develop and launch a ventilator. After it’s been tested, the ventilator then needs to be signed off by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Non-medical device manufacturers won’t already have a license to engineer a ventilator currently, so they would be focusing on existing designs.

“It could not be something that a manufacturer who was not a specialist in the area could look after right away,” says Connolly. “The way that this could be done is if a current manufacturer in the UK who has the proper certification for their device was to subcontract to another production line, then that manufacturer could take responsibility for the production of the device.”

This article quoted a manufacturer in the UK, but the same principles apply here.  Even if the FDA fast-tracked the approval process, testing still needs to be done.

As I said, the fastest way a car company could help is to make parts and be part of the supply chain.

Wired has another article that cover this:

Ventilator Makers Race to Prevent a Possible Shortage
Manufacturers are producing as many as they can to care for Covid-19 patients with breathing problems. Now the federal government is asking for even more.

Retooling a complex supply chain to build more machines quickly will be difficult. Airon relies on suppliers across the Midwest to make the valves and tubing, while another supplier in Washington makes each machine’s casing. A few parts come from China. Gjerde’s looking into whether he can get the circuit boards he needs produced locally.

If Ford or Tesla has in-house circuit board production, that would probably be the best approach to attack the ventilator shortage.

There is no reason to jump in and interrupt functioning supply chains.

If the circuit boards are the bottleneck, it’s not Ford or Tesla that will be the most help, but Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and the rest of our defense agencies.  The circuit boards that go into our nuclear subs and laser-guided missiles are not made in China.  Those are protected technologies.

I bet Lockheed could get a bunch of dumbed-down circuit boards out to an American ventilator supplier faster than Tesla could retool for another one of Musk’s ego-driven pipe dreams.