Car brands are moving from producing vehicles to manufacturing ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic with European distributors joining American companies in making the vital machines.

Last week, General Motors said its supplier was helping produce ventilator parts while Ford has partnered with GE Healthcare to build 50,000 ventilators in Michigan within the next 100 days to help meet demand in the USA.

Now Spanish car brand SEAT is using its Martorell facility, which produces the new Leon, to instead manufacture automated ventilators for local healthcare authorities.

A team of engineers designed a total of 13 different prototypes before the final design was agreed on. The team is now testing the ventilators in collaboration with the local healthcare authority to get approval for mass production to support the fight against COVID-19. 

“Taking an assembly line that manufactures sub-frames, a car part, and adapting it to make ventilators has been a lengthy, difficult job involving many areas of the company, and we managed to do it in the record time of one week”, says Sergio Arreciado, part of SEAT’s Process Engineering.