Transcription: Meme with mad max-type cars facing the viewer with the caption: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of car culture"
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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What I love about the whole Mad Max post apocalyptic wasteland is that ...... everyone has enough fuel to go wandering around the desert. A raiding party of a dozen transports, riding with a bunch of small cars and motorcycles would probably consume several hundred gallons of fuel in one afternoon.
It would probably take a year before all available fuel would be depleted and then there would be nothing to replenish it all. Sure you can use alcohol but that is in even smaller supply and most of it would have been consumed by people anyway.
We'll be able to build, fix, and maintain gas powered engines after the apocalypse but we won't have any fuel to keep them running.
The newer movies expand the wasteland to three "fortresses" that factions fight for control: the citadel has a fresh water reservoir and food, the bullet farm was a mining town turned into an arms factory, and gastown controls an oil refinery that everyone depends on (and slaves to keep it working). Lore wise, gasoline is one of the commodities they've continued creating and exporting.
Unless gastown is sitting on one giant underground oil reservoir that they actively pump themselves .... gastown will run out of fuel as fast as everyone else.
Bullet farm also needs to keep importing or manufacturing specialized chemicals and compounds to make the explosives for bullets.
The only town that could actually exist is the citadel. Any place that has a supply of fresh clean water will always draw human habitation, even without guns, fuel, big trucks or motorcycles.
It very conveniently pumps it's own oil from the sands! But fiction aside - I do think gas is a resource that would be processed and controlled throughout a mad max like downfall. Too much in war depends on fossil transport to allow that supply chain to crumble. Just reinforces the meme lol.
I agree ... in a post apocalyptic collapse everyone will be scrambling to control fuel reserves ... but the only places that will occur is wherever the oil or raw resources are located in the ground. For the first few years, everyone will fight for whatever fuel is lying around in tanks or storage facilities. After that everyone will go after the sources because none of it will survive being transported anywhere far from where it is manufactured. Everywhere else that is not within about 50 - 100 km of a fuel source will revert to the middle ages and will be using horses, swords and bows and arrows.
A better use for any fuel that anyone could have is to use it as a weapon like Greek Fire .... or mixing it with wax or styrofoam to use it as napalm for offensive attacks or defence against attackers
In Germany during WWII they were able to keep cars running using wood gas, where they'd burn wood and vent the off-gassing into the car's engine. This would be realistic for the Mad Max universe but it wouldn't be very cool for all the Apocalypticars to be towing wood stove trailers - and I don't remember ever seeing a tree in a Mad Max movie.
That's when you start burning mummies.
How dare you? Mummies are for painting.
Wouldn't even be a year. Gasoline has a shelf life of six months. Three months if it's an ethanol blend.
After that, you're down to homemade diesel, electric vehicles, and bicycles.
That's not correct. I have ethanol-free petrol for my chainsaw that has a shelf life of 5 years guaranteed (probably lasts longer, since that's from the time of purchase)
Not everyone knows that ethanol is simply worse for fuel efficiency and only exists to be a corn subsidy for farmers. I know E85 tuning exists which is cool but it’s still mostly trash.
Yah. The fact that we're turning edible food into worse gas, and thereby driving up food prices worldwide for no reason, is nothing short of inhumane. It's not even a reduction in greenhouse gas; it requires so much processing that it's about the same as just pumping crude out of the ground.
It would have made more sense to just pay farmers more with subsidies, instead oil lobbyist tricked ag lobbyist into accepting this deal (or more likely bribed them).
Hmmm, interesting. Looks like there's some fuel stabilizers that can preserve it for a few years (most of what I can find are for 1-3 years). I'm guessing the 5-year blend has a shorter shelf life once opened? The really interesting part seems to be that some of these stabilizers can be added to old gasoline to make it usable again. So as long as an organization had an utterly gigantic supply of stabilizer, they could potentially keep using gas for quite a while.
These stabilizers are definitely not in regular gasoline, though, so everyone except the extremely paranoid would be SOL.
Stabilizers are marketing BS, they can't rejuvenate old fuel and they generally work by introducing an additional component that reduces the ability of the fuel (mostly the methanol content) to absorb water ... however they rarely have a positive effect over all because they cause other problems.
Long shelf-life fuel is made in the refining stage. European standard E10 petrol can last a year or more if it's stored correctly ... I know this because I sometimes do store it for that long by accident.