One of my favorite thought experiments is trying to figure out which cars in my fleet would be ideal for escaping some sort of apocalypse. As it turns out, I’m not the only one thinking about this stuff and the results are hilarious.
This week, Mark Tucker’s Shitbox Showdown entries have been about finding the perfect car to ride out the apocalypse in. Today’s matchup was between a 2009 Nissan Altima Hybrid and a 2014 Chevy Volt. Zeppelopod gives a hilariously detailed explanation as to why a Volt would suck at this:
Chiming in as a 2013 Volt owner here.
The Volt is an extremely reliable car, but it does have some shortcomings for a specifically post-apocalyptic environment:
It’s heavy. It’s about 3800lbs which means if it gets stuck off road, it will be that much harder to pull out. The fuel tank is small. This era of Volt has just under 9 gallons of fuel capacity. So you’re going to be using that hatch to carry a few canisters which will eat into your cargo.It has weak spots in the front, specifically around the charge port and the battery’s radiators. A hit there even in non-apocalyptic times tends to total these cars. Armor accordingly. What does it bring to the table though?
Torque. That powertrain is stout AF. The exact same powertrain was factory warrantied for over 200hp and 400lb-ft of torque in the Cadillac ELR, so it’s got a lot more to give. It’s frankly overbuilt for what it is. Some good frame welds and you could turn it into a local tractor for pulling stuff in your community.
Energy conversion. A lot of post-apocalyptic settings are short on one specific energy type. It would really shine as a local generator if fuel was abundant but electricity was scarce. Or, if the other was true, it can do about 25-35 miles (assuming extra energy consumption due to wasteland modifications) on 10.5kWh of electron juice. You can sleep in it! A buddy of mine bought a Volt after driving mine (to my chagrin, we autocrossed them and I was slower) and he made a mattress for it the exact size and shape of the cargo space with the seats down and the butt rests taken out. It’s almost perfectly flat and if you’re hooked up to power you can run the A/C to make things nice and comfy. Who doesn’t love a Voltebago?
Conclusion: The Altima is for the bloodthirsty Immortan Joe raiders whereas the Volt is for the Vuvulani community.
I think of my cars I’d probably either have to take the Plymouth Special DeLuxe or my Smart Fortwo diesel. One’s super easy to repair (more on that later), the other would run on basically any fluid that burns!
Last night’s COTD involved a lovely story about the Dodge Caliber. Our favorite meme commenter chimes in at the perfect moments. Jatco Xtronic CVT:
Clark B, you did a good thing. Those calibers have fantastic transmissions too. Heartwarming story.
Mechjaz:
I’m not crying that’s just eye coolant
Andy Individual:
Blinker fluid?
Great, I’m laughing so hard that I’m coughing. Have a great evening, everyone!
I’ve nearly always driven 4×4’s since I’ve had my license, so it was pretty hard getting used to the fact that my Volt is approximately 2 mm from the road surface. Would be horrible offroad. In fact it’s still pretty poor on decently maintained forest service roads.
Woo COTD!
Before the formatting ate my post, I was trying to detail how the Volt could work in a post-apocalyptic setting, just not the stereotypical Mad Max “wasteland raiders” role. (Because let’s be honest, does anything exude more bloodthirsty energy than an Altima?)
The Volt is more suited to the Fallout 4 settlement role, where its utility can serve the community well. Just make sure to protect those front weakspots from renegade Altima gangs.
“Smart Fortwo diesel…run on basically any fluid that burns!”
I do not think Illinois becomes warmer in the apocalypse. You would probably want to install a fuel line heater before heading out into the frozen wasteland on a tank of grease. There are nice ones that hook up to the coolant system for those that like to be prepared.
I’ve actually thought about this. Why? I’m not a prepper, I’m not a SHTF kinda guy. I don’t even believe an apocalypse is near. As far as I’m concerned, the unholy grind we’re in right now is going to continue for a very, very long time indeed. We’re just too good at breeding to end our own suffering. Well, that, and the whole nuclear proliferation treaty thing. We’ve got some people in some pretty important positions right now whose sanity can be openly questioned, sure, at least from where I’m sitting, but regardless of what they say, they’re at least smart enough not to hit The Big Red Button.
Believe it or not, because I read a book. It’s a post-apoc novel and it gets a lot of things right, but the guy who wrote it, Jack McDevitt, has a consistent… ‘thing’ with each and every novel he writes where he screws up a key detail. It’s always something that, when you first notice it, just kind of snags you as “huh, that doesn’t really fit”, but when you actually put real thought to it, the whole book unravels before you like a mummy turning to dust and leaving their wrappings behind.
For example, in his novel Eternity Road, he sticks with an unfortunate trope of the post-apoc genre. His characters ride horses.
My mother used to ride horses. She’s actually studied the way people lived in the Colonial Era, most particularly the 1750s, because For Reasons that time period has a lot of importance to her. (That’s its own story, actually. Not today!) There was actually horse infrastructure at that time.
See, it’s not as simple as having a post with a rope at the local watering hole in some tiny nothing town during your spaghetti Western. When your primary means of transportation is either your two feet or a horse, whether or not that horse is pulling a carriage, you actually NEED that infrastructure in your society. You need public stables. You need people mucking out those stables and bringing in hay and other supplies. You need equine veterinary care available. You need farriers — the people who shoe horses. You need blacksmiths to make the horseshoes in the first place (amongst other things)… leather-crafters to make horse tack — saddles, saddlebags, spurs, all that cowboy stuff that goes on a horse so you can ride it. On top of all of that, horse-riding is a skill, and it’s a non-trivial one. Have you ever seen the movie Gallipoli? There’s a scene where a guy wants to get into the horse-cavalry, this is during WW1, and he thinks it’s as simple as getting on a horse and yelling commands. The horse never even freaking moves, and he gets to look like an utter fool and a clown. That is actually 1000% realistic.
The bottom line is, in a post-apoc scenario, we are NOT going back to riding horses. It’s simply not a realistically feasible happenstance. OK, so… what then?
Petroleum products and electricity are both going to be scarce commodities, at best, as well. Sorry, but The Day The Bombs Fall, nobody’s going to spare some refinery somewhere just so you can get dino juice for your suburban assault vehicle. Even if they do, by sheer chance, the path that stuff takes from crude oil pumped up from the ground, often far beneath an ocean somewhere halfway around the world, to a refinery, through that refinery, and to some sort of something that can reasonably put gasoline or diesel fuel into a private vehicle of some sort… that is even more non-trivial, by far, than horse-riding. There’s a lot of really delicate steps to that operation, where if things go even slightly wrong, you get a lot of fire followed by a lot more explosions. Very big fire, specifically, and even bigger explosions, in each case. As for electricity… the reason, for example, car batteries are a problem in The Third World isn’t so much availability — they’ve got tons of em — it’s that charging infrastructure is… kind of wanting at best. A floating-cell lead acid battery (or ANY lead-acid battery, for that matter) can take some pretty impressive levels of abuse, compared to many other battery chemistries, but even still, there’s only so much that it can take. You feed it garbage electricity from an unregulated charger (or worse, a broken one) and it will absolutely screw with capacity. Do so with any regularity and you have a great recipe for killing batteries en masse. The electrical grid is a very carefully balanced machine — go on YouTube and get a proper understanding of just what happened during that mega blackout in the upper Northeast USA and up into Canada in 2003, and you’ll see what I mean. In a post-apoc scenario, having electrical infrastructure operating at a Third World level is a borderline god-tier miracle… battery power of any meaningful employ will be likewise a VERY good day, if not a minor miracle in and of itself.
OK, so… where does that leave us?
Well, as it turns out, the most likely scenario is, you’re going to have to build something out of what’s available in order to haul anything of any capacity. Probably it will indeed be a cargo vehicle and not a passenger one — think, hauling agricultural products to a central market. That’s your most likely scenario, actually, since our civilizations begin with centralized agriculture, historically.
So, what do you have to work with? America’s trash and junk, the stuff we’ll all leave behind. Wood studs ripped out from abandoned homes, cut to size, form your frame, your chassis. Old car wheels and wheel hubs still work, but brakes are not going to be a thing you can really reliably salvage — you’re going to be relying on makeshift cable-operated band-brakes instead, because that’s something you can actually build. (Sorry, hydraulics are a lot harder to master than you likely want to think right now.) School buses have good seats, and old retail shelving, the beige stuff, has many uses, from forming the walls of a pickup bed to just about anything else where you need sturdy metal sides or floor.
What about the engine? Not internal combustion, sorry. As crazy as it sounds, it’s actually much more feasible to cobble together a Stirling engine out of junk and scrap. Sure, it’s got p***-all horsepower, but one advantage you have is that Stirling engines work like steam engines in that regard — and if you’ve ever been to one of those old country steam fairs, you know that a “5hp” traction engine can haul donkey ;3 like a light-duty Chevy.
Shopping-cart wheels with the tires removed are great pillow-block bearings. Steel electrical conduit makes for sturdy connecting rods and the like. Something like a cut-up fire extinguisher will do for a cylinder jug. Alcohol stoves fed high-test grain alcohol (the kind where you need a special high-pressure still to make it… I hope you have an old copy of Mother Earth News stashed away somewhere! You need 150-180 Proof stuff, minimum, here. Just don’t try to drink it.) An engine with a big piston and a big displacer (the displacer cylinder should be about twice the volume of the primary cylinder) will get you the torque you need to move your improvised mini truck. Old bike tires sewn into a belt, with a pulley on a lever, form a slip-clutch that lets you control when you move (or don’t). Rig up two, with one belt in figure-eight form, and you have a reverse gear.
Lighting? Dig a motor out of a random printer, any motor is a generator if spun. Hook two 6v floating lanterns to it, in SERIES, to make a 12v pair of lamps. (Remove the old lantern batteries first, you won’t need em.) Run it off the main flywheel — chances are your engine won’t spin fast enough to overvolt your lanterns. Even a 16v motor (common in HP printers, amongst others) isn’t gonna be operating full tilt here, and motors make lousy improvised generators to begin with.
But, basically, that’s what you’re looking at. I’ve thought about this, on and off, for over fifteen years. There’s still some holes in my knowledge, stuff I’ve not yet figured out. Maybe someday I will, just for fun. Who knows?
Didn’t Native Americans, Mongols and others successfully ride horses for centuries with none of those things?
…I’m just going to say, your handle gives me a smirk, and move right along.
The entirety of Mongolian society is based around the horse. The horse was introduced to the Americas by Europeans who also brought the horse infrastructure with them, so not really a good comparison.
Fun fact, there is no such thing as a wild horse (in the Americas, and probably none left in the world). The animals we call wild horses are actually escaped/let loose domesticated horses (and their descendants) making them feral horses.
Why wouldn’t Native Americans be a good comparison? Native Americans used horses from their introduction by the Conquistadors in the 16th century to the 19th with nothing but stone age tech.
Several reasons. The Native Americans grew up around animals where most of us did not so the knowledge and infrastructure was already mostly in place. We are also talking about a totally different time scale. In the example in the article we are talking days, weeks, months, maybe the first year or two. For the native Americans it took decades for the use of horses to expand.
My point is just that you don’t need a bronze age or newer infrastructure to successfully use horses (although that infrastructure helps success a lot). I completely agree though one can’t just hop on a horse and go like it’s a car. If you don’t *know* horses you’ll probably end up being killed by it, abandoned by it or killing it out of neglect. I’m sure the Native Americans, maybe even the Mongols had a steep learning curve in the beginning too but that story is lost to history.
Where I grew up there’s a lot of racing stables, so there actually is horse related infrastructure, even if it’s mainly used for rich people’s toys/pets.
Otherwise the best ‘post-apocalypse’ transport would be a bike. They’re cheap, widely available, easily repaired, and easy to learn to use.
Your most likely transportation is Fat Bikes and some kind of EV that accepts a direct solar charge so it can work as a power source as well.
But bikes are definitely the answer. Small, silent, nimble, easy to repair with minimal skills. Foam fill the tires and trade off comfort for durability.
Solar and/or a stream are your best bets for power. you can make a water wheel hooked to an alternator and a battery bank. That’ll give you lights and refrigeration. Those are the only two comforts you REALLY need to make things easy.
Ah, I love our 2017 Volt.
But agreed, once the gremlins get in (or the soon coming apocalypse takes over) its just one big thimble sized gas tank and a bajillion rechargeable AA batteries.
My son had a crazy girlfriend who wanted a car with no electronics so that it would survive the apocalypse. I guess she thought that there would be a big EMP that would blow up every thing from CPUs to transistors.
So, what is the latest car that had no electronic ignition? What about diodes in the alternator?
Anyway, when I told her that she should get a shotgun and learn how to use it, she looked at my like I was insane. My point was that after the end times, if you did not have a shotgun, you would lose your vehicle in the first 20 minutes.
She was also nervous about chemtrails. I never asked her about vaccines. My son ended up moving out and to a different country to get clear of her.
Me, I’m old enough to realize that if things get really bad, the survivors will envy the dead…
So, if a blown diode is a dead-ode, would a blown diode, post-zombie apocalypse be an undead-ode?
Ba-dum tssh!
Haha, Bill Burr did a bit on that, that if you’re a prepper and not able to defend yourself, you’re just gathering food/supplies for the strongest guy on the block.
And yet the Volt couldn’t even save GM from the Carpocalypse. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Especially the back seat if you’re over 5’8″. Back to stalking Volts on CarGurus. Maybe I’ll call the dealer and just hang up.
GM seems to have a problem with marketing cars that are unusual in any meaningful way. The Volt was essentially an electric car without range anxiety. Saturns were America’s homegrown Volvo. GM couldn’t figure out how to market either one. Kinda makes you wonder.
You don’t think making a commercial about producing a right hand drive version of your car and exporting it to Japan is an effective way to market to Americans?
One of the biggest issues is they compromised rear seat space for battery packaging (no center rear position) and aerodynamics, thinking people really only needed a 4-door coupe only to hit the market just as Uber was turning every car into a taxi.