Imagine The Walking Dead started in 50 years from now. The way things are going now, picture this scenario:
>A survivor is walking down a lonesome road.
>They arive at a small resort and there’s a car covered in dust and dirt in the parking lot.
>They approach the car and check whether it still has some bio fuel left in the tank.
>Still plenty.
>They look around spotting a decayed body close by.
>They search the body and are lucky to find a ‘keyless’ key belonging to the car.
>There are no door handles and the battery inside the key corroded away.
>They break the glass and open the door from the inside.
>Finally inside, there’s still no way to start the engine without the key.
>They have an idea.
>The digital wrist watch on the body should have the same battery as the key.
>After a bit of tinkering with some tools they get the key working again.
>They press the ignition button.
>The displays light up but the engine remains quiet.
>The displays show error messages:
ERROR CODE: ND47089
Tire pressure sensor subscription expired
Please schuedule service or enter payment information
Engine start failed
>MFW
Bigger problem is going to be old fuel. Gasoline degrades over time and becomes less combustible. It also gets gummy in small passages like fuel injectors, especially with ethanol. Wiring insulation gets hard and breaks, wires corrode. Animals intrude and eat wires. Brake and fuel lines rust through, brake hoses swell shut from the inside.
You want a carbureted small block Chevy or Ford. It might still be effort to make it run, but it’ll be far more likely to scrounge up the very generic spare parts and supplies needed.
Nope.
Pre 1990 mechanically fuel injected, naturally aspirated diesels. 7.3 or 6.9 IDI, 6.2 Detroit, most Cummins industrial engines.
Diesel lasts significantly longer in storage (2+ years) than volatile gasoline (6mo max). I’ve even seen some non-mixed diesel last 10+ years when stored right.
But the biggest deal is that compression ignition engines can basically run on literally any vaguely flammable liquid substance. You can make biodiesel from a ton of stuff ranging from oil bearing crops to animal fat. They run way longer on oil changes because they don’t dump as much thin gas into their oil. And there are no real consumables like spark plugs, distributor caps/rotors/points.
In a post-society situation real fossil fuels or petroleum lubricants or parts will not be available.
Old petrol engines do have something making them worthwhile though - they’re easier to run on wood gas. A gasifier would open options for fuel availability considerably as wood is a lot more likely to be accessible.
An old Lister or Listeriod clone would be king for power generation. Originally made in England and now India because the patents expired, these thing are massive stationary engines popular in rural India for running farm equipment and village generators. They’re also popular in rural Canada for running backup power for their low maintenance and reliability. If you’re setup properly, you can even change the oil while the engine is running.
As an anecdotal note I must mention that my lawnmower works just fine with gasoline that’s over a year old.
I ran my crappy lawmower on crappy gas I filled up 2-3 years ago, and I’ve never done any maintenance on it. I can tell it’s not happy but also I’m sure this $100 lawnmower is a lot simpler than any road vehicle made in the last 50 years
FYI the Navistar DT466 was mechanically injected until 1995.
God, I want one of those. I need to start looking again once my current diesel project is done.
I own a 2003 International school bus with a DT466e. Not mechanical, obviously, but it only has 39K miles on it after a rebuild - built like a brick chicken house, as they say.
I was reading about the wet sleeved cylinders and didn’t understand why that wasn’t more common, but then again, car companies want you to buy a whole new vehicle rather then fix anything. Trunks now a days are way to posh for my taste anyway.
I’m always annoyed that you don’t see more wood spirit(aka methanol) in the post-apocalypse. They’ll make en ethanol still and then complain about a lack of fuel for their diesel generator as they’re standing next to a forest.
Wait, you can’t make ethanol from wood? I guess that would make sense, because otherwise you’d see a lot more wood liqueurs, I’ve only ever heard of alcohol made from maple syrup, birch, and pine (but that last one was from a rural Austrian town and they aren’t allowed to sell it elsewhere, so it might be a little more poisonous than the others). This is going to be a rabbit hole.
Edit: you can, but it’s not the traditional way of turning wood into alcohol, and an efficient method has only recently been developed.
Just a PSA.
Trees (and plants in general) are made of sugars.
That’s why I was initially surprised, but the og method involved high heat to break down the woodiness of the fibers, and that leads to methanol, not ethanol. You do need sugars for either though, afaik, because the yeast has to eat something either way.
Yeah diesels are always going to be first choice, but in the US at least, there’s just not very many of them that aren’t semi trucks.
You’d be surprised. They’re less common in urban areas, but you can find multiple in any parking lot in more rural areas.
Plenty of 250/2500 and 350/3500 series trucks in the US
Tires are another problem. One thing that makes me laugh about the recent Mad Max movies is that all the vehicles have brand-new knobby tires (IIRC the original Mad Max had a lot of properly fucked-up old tires). Since those movies are mostly practical effects, they needed good tires for safety but it’s totally unrealistic for a post-apocalyptic world. In reality they’d use old tires until they exploded - like most of the world today.
Refining gasoline is unlikely enough in these scenarios, but they’d have no way of sourcing the rubber for new tires, let alone the capacity to manufacture them.
Diesel. Still same problems, but diesel will burn a lot more fuel sources, some that can be made far easier than gasoline.
Oh yes, and an old diesel with mechanical injection will be best.
Gas goes bad.
That’s … what I said?
Sorry. It’s a reference to last man on earth and I couldn’t help myself.
Man I miss that show, sorry I didn’t get the reference. It got killed off right in the middle of “shit’s about to go down,” and I will never forgive whoever made that decision.