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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IIRC, the first Mad Max was partly imagined as a satire of car culture in Australia
Interesting! Got a source on that?
I remember seeing in an interview of Director George Miller. But! I may have another source: https://gizmodo.com/stories-from-the-sets-of-mad-max-the-road-warrior-1702490722
Thanks!
Needs a sequel where they’re defeated by a cooperative riding war bikes
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This post got reported because it's an image of text without a transcription. That's not against the rules, but it would be nice if you could edit it to add one.
Np, done 👍
gotta train that AI somehow :D (/s)
TBF public transport is kinda lacking in the apocalypse
It's realistic that the most vicious people would hold on to the status symbols of before, and to indoctrinate those born after into the same way of thinking
In most cataclismic sci-fi cars seem to be of little or no importance, which makes sense given that most countries have no oil themselves and even for those which do, the ability of actually extracting the stuff from the current hard to reach modern reserves (the stuff doesn't just boil out of the ground nowadays) and refining it isn't likely to be available at all for what's left of society.
Curiously, electric cars and solar panels make post-catacysmic use of cars more likely than the ICE engine of the cars in Mad Max.
That said, given enough time whatever stock of solar panels use will be gone to just natural degradation and exposure to the elements and the technology to do more won't be there anymore (though wind and water generation would still be possible), plus the roads themselves will become unusable as Nature does its thing.
The most likely Mad-Max post-cataclismic future will be using animal-drawn vehicles or just people riding the animals.
Counterpoint, Imagine a dystopia belonging to transit ….. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6156584/plotsummary/
They tend to go hand-in-hand
Lol where would they even get the fuel
Gas Town of course
Same, but gun culture.
And the end of Australians.
Mad max movies are the only reasonable use for cars.
Fury Road on every street in every city throughout the world!
So many sci fi with flying shuttles instead of cars though. Not all of them private property.