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
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.