Tesla recently shared this video and I thought this community might appreciate what they're doing.   I have always admired the tenacity and resolve of this company and am pretty impressed with the product they've managed to create in almost no time.

Shut it down .

Missing a humidifier.
Relying strictly on room air to contain adequate moisture is NOT going to work.
If the oxygen is from a bottle it is 0% humidity.

By the time they’re done we won’t need them anymore

They would be nothing without the tax money that has been unconstitutionaly given to them

Does it randomly incinerate itself, too?

Humidifier is in the diagram @ 0:40

And labeled as "Outside Tesla System."
So it is NOT part of the ventilator design.

I applaud the effort and desire to help.

Making more ICU rooms and more ventilators is liking more single seat jet fighter aircraft.

The limiting factor is not the vents or the aircraft,
It’s how many people can manage patients on a vent or be the pilot.

I am sure they are designing to a controlled interface.

It's only a matter of time until we can remove pilots from aircraft in commercial industry.  I can't wait.

Sometimes Tesla is TOO ambitious and they jump on what is trending without having real expertise.

IE, their "pod" they designed to help rescue the boys trapped in the cave. It was 18" diameter and 7' long. Yet there were places where the rescuers had to remove their gear and push it ahead of them and make 90 degree turns doing that. Their pod didn't come close to meeting the need yet they pushed forward bc they were so clueless they didn't even realize they were clueless about just how tight the passageways were.

IMHO, this is another case of them being clueless. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. There are already simplified ventilator designs out there. We need manufacturing support at all component levels. GM is retooling their Kokomo IN electronics plant to produce a simplified version of a ventilator made by Ventec Life Support Systems in WA. The engineers at Ventec (you know, the ones with actual expertise) did the design for simplifying the ventilator; GM is just making it.

Why does Tesla think they can throw engineers with electric car experience at a medical problem and not kill people? I used to have a boss that thought every mechanical engineer was interchangeable. You have a mechanical engineering problem? Let me see which engineer shows availability on the spreadsheet and he/she can do it! No regard for which one is experienced in that. I left that job and found one that values my individual expertise and skills. Guess what! Fewer mistakes bc my expertise is applicable and much better product results!

Edit, I'm pretty sure Tesla wants to stay in the headlines, they want the media attention. When they offer up help and find out that it isn't needed or their role won't earn them a chance in the spotlight they cut and run and forge their own path just to keep the attention up.

I think it was a wise decision from both engineering and business perspectives to use existing parts from their supply chain.

These parts were already in inventory and could be spun quickly into production. From an engineering standpoint, why would you modify your entire supply chain if you can achieve the requirements with existing capabilities?

From a business standpoint, it would be irresponsible for Tesla to sit on inventory that is otherwise useless due to current economic and health situations. This solution allows them to mitigate at least some of the capital tied up in the supply chain and inventory.

The idea that they should "simply" retool their production to suit an already existing design doesn't make a ton of sense.

Does any media exist of a Ford or GM ventilator? I doubt it, because those companies are stifled by bureaucracy and lack the agility to bring a product to market rapidly.

So you think the vents are going to be automated and the intensivist can be replaced?

I don’t recall where in the Constitution it says to deny Tesla money.  

Link?

I think the potential exists to better integrate all of these systems and improve the flow of data and control to a point that increases the management capability of a respiratory therapist threefold or more.

The respiratory therapist is not deciding how to manage the vent while considering the patient’s heart failure, pulmonary embolus, sepsis, need for dialysis, acute renal failure, and their DKA.

And I don’t see an automated system doing that either.

Similar technology is already operating automobiles and aircraft in the world today and the similarities are notable- Tesla.

There are a finite amount of discrete inputs and outputs for these machines. I'm not sure if the demand will ever materialize to develop an automated ventilator system as this crisis seems to be managed at the moment, but existing science can support it.

So what do you guys think? Buy more tesla stock or is this rube goldberg machine a cash hole?

You are so completely missing the concept of managing a complex medical patient  with competing system issues that require opposite management and balancing those I don’t think you understand how ludicrous you sound.

When something that should work, but makes things worse because of something else, and what should make things worse, but helps, because of...
The whole point is this in the realm where it takes an educated, trained, and experienced human to manage and the sort of thing automated systems do poorly.

I would not trade Tesla based on what happens with their ventilators.

ETA- I think the significance of ventilator progress is miniscule compared to all of the other economic factors at play. A poster in another thread noted that Tesla could be the only profitable automobile manufacturer for a period of time which would be prodigious.

I am surprised to see so much vitriol against Tesla on this site, I thought we revered American innovation and manufacturing

You are so completely missing the point of how integrated systems work. In a medical context of competing priorities and contraindicated treatments, how did the medical care providers learn to balance their treatments? Formal education, experience, and in some cases- intuition which begs the discussion if intuition is even a valid medical protocol.

In a fully integrated system, interventions could be programmed from existing data and medical knowledge along with the requisite feedback loops to monitor efficacy and monitor treatments. I suspect that a machine could provide even more effective treatment than a human could.

Your digging so much deeper based on what your “suspect” it’s just getting more ridiculous.

Protocols, checklists, etc., the type of things that would be programmed in, are often what kill people.

Intuition and gestalt are what often save people from those mistakes.

Computerized, algorithmic EKG interpretations are frequently wrong for one example.  
People follow ACLS protocols and kill people instead of doing something different and saving them.
People follow chest pain protocols and kill people instead of skipping one of the meds and having them survive to appropriate care.

At this point, and for the foreseeable future, there is a degree of information that someone can look, see, hear, feel, smell clinically that cannot be measured and programmed in.  Most likely, intuition and gestalt are an evaluation of oneself able data that there is not a way to mechanically record and feed into a system.  The human body and medical issues are a probability cloud exercise and not a Newtonian calculable function.

A lot of the computerized and evaluated information is wrong.  Pulse oximetry is often wrong.  Or may read normal in conditions where a human has other observable signs the patient is not oxygenating.  Cardiac monitors, like EKGs,  often give incorrect rates, rhythms, etc. Arterial lines  may not be zeroed properly. Automated blood pressure monitors are frequently significantly wrong.

We are faced with trying to get a computer to manage someone based on information that cannot be observed and fed to them, information that can be measured and fed to them but is frequently wrong, computerized algorithms that are frequently wrong, lab values that are often errors a human would recognize as suspect, and protocols that have many, frequent exceptions.

An automated Tesla vehicle being randomly and incorrectly told it was going twice as fast as it is, that incoming June bugs were on coming automobiles, that its tire pressures were randomly twice or 1/10 the psi, that sidewalks were roads, could not detect bicycles or motorcycles at random periods,  etc. would not work.

We don’t even have a way to measure much of the information A human can obtain just from being next to a patient yet.

In engineering not understanding what you do not know can be dangerous.

There are the 'known unknowns' and the 'unknown unknowns.'
The later ones will bite you in the @ss at just the wrong time.
See Murphy.

Correct...