It was less about the similarity of product than about engineering experience and the principles of mass production. The entire US auto industry flipped to wartime production and built a wide variety of munitions and transport systems. The auto industry was not alone in the switch, either. Smith-Corona, known for typewriters, produced rifles, sidearms, Navy guns, bomb parts and more. Burroughs Corporation, known for adding machines and other office equipment, produced Norden bomb sights. The list goes on and on.

The Ford Willow Run bomber plant is actually a bit out of the norm in that it was specifically designed and built for aircraft production whereas most plants were merely re-tooled to affect the switch to wartime production. Even though Ford had a past history of aircraft production, having built the Ford Trimotor until mid-1933, there wasn't much easy about getting Willow Run up and running. The original aircraft design was Consolidated's, not Ford's, so in January 1941 Ford officials visited Consolidated to determine mass production feasibility. Consolidated's goal was 350 planes in a year but Ford officials saw it wouldn't be met due to the way Consolidated was building them. Ford agreed to undertake production, broke ground for a specifically designed factory in April 1941, continually tweaked the aircraft design, created specialized machine tools when advantageous (including a one-of-a-kind Ford-designed center wing milling machine that saved hundreds of labor hours per wing over Consolidated's method), and refined assembly procedures, all of which contributed to decreasing assembly times.