It’s not making curtains yet, but as Ford Motor Co. makes more medical supplies for the global pandemic, it appears to be taking creative inspiration from The Sound of Music.
Like General Motors, which last week received a $ 489 million government contract to make fans, Ford is already shifting some of its idle assembly lines from auto components to respirators. On Monday, the automaker revealed that it is also producing a number of other medical supplies, including face masks and, calling the Von Trapps, reusable gowns that will be made of silicone-coated nylon. Ford generally develops quite differently.
“In fact, it’s the same material that we use in our vehicles for our airbags,” said Marcy Fisher, Ford’s global director of exterior and interior body engineering, during a conference call with reporters.
“It actually has the qualities that we need” for liquid permeability and can be washed and reused up to 50 times, Fisher added.
His company, which designed the gowns in consultation with a local Detroit hospital, said its airbag supplier expects to cut and sew 1.3 million of them by early July. The automaker also set targets Monday for the production of face masks, which it will distribute internally and seek to certify for medical use; and for a battery-powered air-purifying respirator, or PAPR, that it has developed with 3M.
Ford has yet to disclose its budget to make all of these supplies. “We’ve been approving a lot of things on what we call a ‘not to be exceeded’ number,” Fisher told Fortune in an interview earlier this month.
