How do companies go from making cars today to making medical equipment tomorrow?
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Car component suppliers do, car makers and assemblers don’t, if you are making a fiddly bit for a car it isn’t that difficult to retool to make a fiddly medical piece of equipment.
They cant in general. Some would be able to convert in weeks, most would take months for the direct equipment. But there are a lot of other kinds of equipment that need to be made to support things.
Stuff like beds, generators, and the like for triage sites can be made immediately. As can things like face masks, goggles, gowns, etc. Even things like sterilization equipment can be shifted to fairly quickly as they are somewhat simple to make.
Typically you have the industries that make similar things retool to make something that is needed. For example during WWII you had car manufacturers making military vehicles, etc. So most car makers would not be able to retool for medical equipment typically. But Musk is a bit different with his companies. His companies are extremely tech focused which means they have clean rooms already. They have high tech equipment that can make complex things and so it is potentially possible for him to shift things in some of his plants to start making more complex medical equipment in a relatively short period of time.
Answer: If you are someone like Musk, you will have all sorts of funky arse technology in your manufacturing plants. With the right engineers, he can do anything he wants to do.
There was a guy in Italy that 3D printed the parts needed for the ventilators? by reverse engineering the original part. The original manufacturer is ropeable, because he was producing the part at $1 a piece instead of paying the $11k that they sold them for. Remembering of course that the 3D printed part was just an instant solution, not designed to be used again VS the original part which is reusable I believe.
Medical devices, drugs, etc., require [“clean” environments](https://www.cleanroom-industries.com/media/tz_portfolio/article/cache/how-personnel-are-monitored-in-a-cleanroom-191_L.jpg), and also require FDA auditing / supervision. The personnel must be trained, the facility must be vetted by the FDA, the product must be approved by the FDA, etc. It takes at least a couple years.
They don’t.
Some more general purpose equipment like lathes and presses can be retooled fairly quickly, but a factory designed to produce boat hulls has neither the equipment nor the engineering support to start manufacturing defibrillators.
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