BUFFALO, N.Y. —
On March 25, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the Buffalo Gigafactory would reopen as soon as humanly possible to produce ventilators. As far as WGRZ has been able to confirm, officials from New York State did not ask Musk or Tesla to produce ventilators and offered to do so on his own accord.
Since then, however, Tesla hasn’t responded to our requests for clarification. On Sunday the company posted a video on their YouTube channel and demonstrated that they're working on something
“This is Tesla engineering, we’re working in the lab and just want to share it with you," said an unnamed Tesla engineer in the video.
The video doesn’t specify if these engineers are located at the Buffalo facility or another Tesla campus that houses engineers.
“We’re trying to make ventilators out of car parts to help out the medical industry without taking away from the supply chain,” the engineer said.
Since the engineer mentioned they’re trying to make a ventilator out of car parts, it’s presumed these engineers are based out of California. Tesla hasn’t verified where the video was produced when we asked.
The video goes on to highlight the work Tesla engineers have done to produce some version of a ventilator.
There’s still a lot we don’t know. We don’t know if Tesla employs any biomedical engineers who have experience in developing ventilators. We don’t know much about the partnership between Tesla and Medtronic aside from an announcement that the two would be working together to build ventilators.
New York State officials on Sunday confirmed the Tesla plant in Buffalo would be producing something, but not the whole ventilator.
"They're talking about making one part of the ventilator," said Melissa DeRosa, Secretary to Governor Andrew Cuomo. "They're trying to ramp up to get up and running but nothing has finalized yet."
Medtronic has made their intellectual property available for open source development, which allows engineers to pick it apart and use as a base to produce similar ventilators amid the shortage. Tesla hasn't confirmed if they're using the Medtronic intellectual property to develop their parts.
Cuomo also said that any Tesla production of ventilators, in any capacity, wouldn’t help with New York State’s apex of COVID-19 cases. Any contribution would be welcoming to those states that are in need outbreaks elsewhere are confirmed, presuming Tesla and Elon Musk follow through with what they offered to do.