If we are to avoid falling back into our dangerous old ways of not having enough spare capacity then we need to have more diversity and competition in supply, production, and marketing of medical equipment so that health authorities can more easily afford to have excess capacity during the good times in preparation for the bad. Of course sooner would be better but later is not necessarily futile.

And most likely Tesla will probably drop the project entirely as soon as the fuss dies down but that doesn't mean that someone else working on an unconventional approach should necessarily give up just because they won't be in time for this crisis, there will be more crises later.