One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?
Entering our current oil crunch, I think it’s obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that’s been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.
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Best: The Postman. We’re back to walking and riding horses.
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Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is–and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).
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Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency–that would be too out there.
Something else that’s often ignored in these scenarios is that gasoline is not shelf stable for very long. Without refineries or biofuel, most gasoline would degrade within a year from what I understand.
Most realistic would be horses, bikes, maybe biodiesel converted cars or motorbikes and a biodiesel creation setup. I could also see electric vehicles with solar or constructed wind/water wheel power to charge batteries. But batteries of course degrade as well so that isn’t a long term solution unless you can make and repair batteries. Which is a stretch.
I think gasoline used to be more stable, but in 2007 the US gave in to the corn lobby and started adding corn ethanol to gasoline, which does limit shelf life. That’s right, in the United States we take food and give it to our cars.
Motorbikes + biodiesel is probably as far as I´d be willing to go, but we’re well back on the path to civilization at that point. You can kickstart a bike without a battery, too…
Looks like you’re right about ethanol affecting shelf life, but it goes from 3-6 months to around 12 months. So still an issue in longer term apocalypse worlds
https://universaltrades.co/blog/gasoline-shelf-life-guide-en/
Also, I don’t think setting up a small scale biodiesel plant would be out of the question for a large enough sect of sufficiently educated humans in an apocayse setting. But it’s definitely a step above something that a small homestead could reasonably expect to setup imo.
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Bio-Diesel
I think bikes are also not very good since they need maintenance and parts, and it will be very hard to find those and they won’t be produced anymore.
Nah, bike parts last a long time and are relatively simple to fix or even make (as long as you’re not talking about some dentist’s $10k carbon road bike). My main (non-electric) bike is from the early '90s and is still on most of its original parts, except for stuff like tires, brake pads, and the chain.
Also, bikes have existed for 200 years, which means they predate things like, say, the assembly line. I’m pretty confident that even in a post-apocalyptic scenario you could scrape together enough of a supply line and basic tools to build them from salvaged raw materials.