Just the amount of firewood needed over a year of subsistence living would mean serious issues without a mode of transport. Indigenous subsistence folk moved camp often, not only because of depleting the local wildlife / slash n’ burn plots for food, but because there was no pickable firewood left within a realistic foraging range anymore. Those people had the space to do it, but the Apocalypse has much higher population densities, even after the initial die-off.
A hundred other subsistence tasks would be greatly facilitated by having a set of wheels for a period. Imagine carrying barrels, bricks, sheet metal, sacks of grain etc. etc. over substantial distances on foot, while being subject to robbery.
If I have to build, I’m pretty much screwed anyway. Either I can find an unoccupied house still standing, or I make my way into the Appalachians where I know the locations of more than a few caves in heavily forested areas with nearby water sources.
Caves have the advantage of not needing a lot of heating: get a decent distance inside, and in the VA/WV area, they’re 55° year-round, which reduces the quantity of firewood needed to feel warm.
I’d need to have a gun or a bow, and get good enough with it to be able to start shooting deer before I starved, though.
Leave gas in a carbureted engine for a couple years, especially ethanol added, and let me know. I find it’s easier to just throw the carb away and get another on Ebay. Another vote for bikes or quadrupeds, although if my solar array is still working, an e-bike or small EV would be awfully handy
A e-bike, particularly if it’s one of the rugged cargo bikes, would be ideal. You could charge the battery in many different ways, and it gives you enough range to make some decent scavenging runs in your local area, with enough cargo capacity to be useful. And if the battery runs down, you still have the option to just ride it like a normal bike.
We had a family member who had left their car in a garage un-driven for years (3+). Wheels were all flat, covered in dust, battery dead.
We called a tow truck to have it towed but the way the driveway and alley were arranged the tow truck could not get in there at all. So, the guy used a portable battery and connected it to the car. I said no way was that thing gonna start. He turned the ignition and it started right away.
I am not saying the car was in any kind of condition for good operation (tires obviously but old oil and gas and whatever else) but still…it started and was sufficient to drive it 100 feet to the tow truck.
A Ford F-250 pickup with the 7.3 liter IDI Diesel from International Harvester/Navistar.
This engine can use ANYTHING as fuel…used deep-fryer grease, old Automatic Transmission Fluid, charcoal lighter fluid, etc…and the robust suspension is better than the basic setup on the F-150.
Besides, the Ford Pickup has literally been the world’s best selling motor vehicle for over a quarter of a century, so you won’t have a hard time finding spare parts.
As @Tride mentioned, I’ve fought way too much varnishing in carbs that sat a year or two to not have nightmares about it. Ethanol gas seems to be worse, IMO.
Everything but the tires on a bike will last for a very, very long time, and even two or three so you can cannibalize for parts will be a lot cheaper than any motor vehicle. You’d want a good supply of spare tires/tubes on hand when the Apocalypse happened, though.
When the tires do eventually run out, I think I’d probably try wrapping the rims in a bunch of rope.
Having owned bicycles that I have performed less than the minimal required maintenance on, I would expect that a bicycle, tires, chains and all, would long, long outlast me in a world full of zombie hordes.
That was my first thought. It was specifically designed for the sort of conditions one would face after the apocalypse. And in addition to all the other things you mentioned, it was designed to be cranked by hand, so you will never have to worry about finding a replacement battery.
Missed the edit window, but for something a little more modern, how about a Russian UAZ truck? They actually have a lot of the attributes of the Model T – designed to operate in remote parts of Russia on bad roads, rugged, simple to repair, and… a hand crank.
I’ll just quote my earlier answer from a similar thread from 2 years ago, although it asked about EVs for a PA scenario:
One additional concern I’d mention with horses, is that while they are to a degree fuel independent, self-repairing and replicating, that they may be a direct competitor with you depending on the type of apocalypse. If you’re in any sort of post biochem/nuclear Apoc, you’re now needing to vastly increase your contaminant free water, hoping that your horse doesn’t graze on something toxic/contaminated because it doesn’t know any better, and doesn’t make any extra noises or smells that attracts zombies.
In terms of likely --long term-- options, I’ll stick to a bike as I personally lack the skills to locate, train and support a horse.
I’d maybe add another category of apocalypse: Infrastructure-destruction apocalypse. If all of the big cities are nuked, then it’s going to be a lot harder to find replacement cars or car parts. Especially since the places that aren’t nuked are also going to be the places that have the most survivors, who are jealously guarding their own property.
Maybe a good second hand 1980 Lada Riva 1200.
Or a Trabant P50.
The Damnation Alley thingie would be ideal, but I’m still PTSD’ing over dude getting eaten by giant post-apocalyptic mutant flesh-eating cockroaches to entertain the idea much further.
That’s fair @Chronos - in the prior thread, and in this one, I am mostly trying to make the point that a PA has a very wide variety of situations, each of which implies totally different vehicular needs - at least in the short term. Long term, yeah, you’re pretty much screwed no matter what.
If I was to redo the prior post from scratch, I’d probably do it as High vs Low Scarcity rather than population, although there’s normally a huge correlation between them. In most scarcity situations, you want to avoid attention and/or competition than anything else. If there’s relative abundance though (most but not all zombie situations, or the Stand as I mentioned) then you pick and choose whatever you want for immediate needs (granting the likelyhood of congested roads preventing easy travel especially in urban environments).
And again with zombies, a PA implies one of the “world of the dead” scenarios where your first and probably last priority is how not to be noticed by the dead.
I’d go with a railroad handcar. The rail lines will be usable by those vehicles for a long time until survivors or zombies intentionally disassemble them. Even then there are so many miles of track laid that small breaks can be repaired. You can’t go just anywhere, but you can get where you can go fast and carry a lot with you.
