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.
Diesel. Still same problems, but diesel will burn a lot more fuel sources, some that can be made far easier than gasoline.
Like some older diesel engines can run on used fryer oil.
Oh yes, and an old diesel with mechanical injection will be best.
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.
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.