Ask Lemmy

One bit of fiction that gets it pretty right is (brace yourself): The Onion. This video is a masterclass of world building and rammed solid with blink-and-youll-miss-it gags and sleights, including mentioning arduous, multi-day journeys by barge. It's like a cross between the Postman, Mad Max and, well, The Onion.

I thought Station Eleven was pretty good about it, small vehicles / motorcycles for a while, then bicycles and horses + wagons, plus a lot of walking. That was a wildly different scenario though (99.9% of the population poofed in a few day period), so there were a ton of abandoned resources for any survivors.

The Road by Cormac Mccarthy. It's a book and a movie but I have never seen the film. Basically the main character moves his belongings around in a shopping cart with a mirror mounted to it to watch the road behind him. He also keeps a backpack on at all times with essential supplies incase he has to abandon the cart and run.

There is a lot of discussion about diesel and biodiesel, and alcohol.

But we have seen shortages of the liquid fuels before, and it is possible to run small engines on wood. They would have to convert but it is doable. Assuming there are trees or other carbon to burn.

This has been done before when petroleum was in short supply, such as in germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

You can actually use existing engines, and the gassifier is not terribly complicated. I don't know this guy or his videos, https://youtu.be/522BaxM0Jnk but it is similar to others I have seen using a bicycle as the vehicle and a standard engine as the power, wood as the power source.

There are better and worse designs, and certainly not press the button and drive, but its an option.

These were wood powered:

EDIT: I almost forgot, you can make a gas generator station and fill a bag with it to use for the engine.

Like these vehicles here:

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.

Horses are great but require a lot of resources. I think most people would be trudging on foot and cars would be housing not transportation.

Mike Carey The Girl With All the Gifts, that book seems realistic in its approach to transportation.

Worst, Honorable Mention: I didn't watch past Season 2, but I understand the Walking Dead was product-placing current model cars every new season.

Survival Family : People use their old bicycle to go in a road-trip away out of the city.

Not sure why bicycle is so much ignored in post-apocalyptic context when it's very efficient

the most realistic thing I can think of is greasel conversion of diesels but I have never seen it done in a show. Then you just need farming of vegetable oil. Batteries though become problamatic after 10 years.

I think you'd see more bikes. A lot less upkeep than a horse, you can find them relatively easy, and they can sit in a garage for months or years and only need some minor maintenance to get going again.

Edit: I can't think of any books I've read recently that depicts primarily bike based transportation though. Probably because it doesn't look super cool lol

Anecdotally, diesels can sit for a long time and be just fine. I suspect there's something a mechanic could do with an abandoned gasoline car as well. The limiting factor, if we're talking full collapse of civilisation, is refined petroleum.

During the world wars, there were people converting IC engines to run off of wood gasifiers. For that, you either need the skills and tools to reprogram engine timings, or a carburator, though. Diesels can run on vegetable oil, and EVs can run off a solar panel, or, if still running, a wind turbine.

Horses aren't cheap or free to run, either. No matter what, there will be less vehicles, the ones that do exists will tend to be heavily loaded to save money (like you sometimes see in the third world) and they're going to take longer to get where they're going.

Judgement at Nuremberg, you see people riding bicycles.

Probably bikes and walking honestly.

I don't think horses are common enough to be a common post-apocalyptic beast of burden. Besides, the apocalypse itself would probably cause food scarcity, and feeding the horse would most likely instead turn into eating the horse.

But yes, some elite factions m8ght use them for riding, but I suspect it would be very rare. I think The Postman, despite being an awful movie, has elements of realism, in that Holnists (or whatever the anti-Kevin faction was called) would usetheir power to gain access to horses. Or maybe their founder owned a horse ranch during the apocalypse and that's why they're powerful.