The news lately has been impossible to miss: As COVID-19 cases overwhelm hospitals in hard-hit regions, those regions beg for more ventilators to help the badly affected breathe. And there just don’t seem to be enough. Ford and GM are building ventilators to meet the need, and the President is using the Defense Production Act to order companies to build more. Tesla, looking for a way to contribute to the desperate need, has rummaged around in its parts bin and built what appears to be a functional ventilator at least partially out of car parts.
Obviously, not every component can be found in the automotive supply chain. But ventilators are basically air pumps used to assist patients breathe when they’re having difficulty—exactly the situation COVID-19 patients face as the novel coronavirus attacks their lungs. And the company has various sensors, tanks, and other components at its disposal that it has utilized in new ways to create such a device.
Tesla doesn’t go into great detail about which components are utilized, but we can spot a few. One is the Continental-supplied air suspension reservoir tank, which is used as a high-pressure supply tank for the device. The Model 3’s infotainment display and associated computer and control units are used to show the patient’s breathing curve. Various valves and sensors from car production also appear to be used.
The Tesla engineers in the video embedded above note that the ventilator isn’t finished, nor do we have a sense of when the company might start delivering the devices. The immediate need is urgent, and other automakers tooling up to build ventilators (or helping medical device companies expand production) have been criticized about not having their devices ready to deploy during the period of greatest need.
Tesla, typically, is starting from scratch on its design, although the use of well-known components (albeit repurposed) could speed production. Only time will tell.
