Ford Motor Co. made 50,000 ventilators, 20 million face shields, 1.4 million washable isolation gowns, 32,000 air-purifying respirators and $50 million profit and all of it is going toward COVID-19 efforts.
Beyond the equipment produced, Ford announced that it is putting its profit earned from the federal contract back into producing 100 million masks for underserved communities.
About 40 million of those masks have been donated already through Ford Fund, which partners with American Red Cross. The surplus on the $336 million government contract came as a result of purchasing and manufacturing efficiencies in the Ford-General Electric project.
“People often ask me whether we would make a profit from the PPE production,” Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I said I didn’t know and it didn’t matter, we just needed to go like hell to help those in need. Now I can answer that question. Today, I am proud to say we are reinvesting all of our profits to continue the fight against COVID.”
Ford’s mask manufacturing began with ones for its workers before the company used that insight to increase production and create masks for children.
“One of the early things we saw was that to help get kids back to school, it starts with trying to protect them so they’re not carriers of the virus, even if they’re not showing symptoms,” Ford vice president of enterprise product line management Jim Baumbick told Fox Business.
Ford used the fan in the F-150 truck’s climate-controlled seat to develop a powered air-purifying respirator and is now looking into ways to remove the coronavirus from enclosed spaces by using HEPA filters with box fans to circulate and filter the air.
Imagine what the horsepower of a Mustang’s V8 engine could achieve.
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