If you like this sort of analysis, read The Angry Staff Officer.[1] That blog is written by a serving Army officer. He and his buddies analyze Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and even Barbie from the perspective of people who do this as their day job.
The Great Toyota War is interesting to read about. Libya spent billions and lost ~800 tanks to Chad’s Hiluxes and Land Cruisers. Specifically the Battle of Fada was very lopsided with Chad dominating. If you ‘s/Toyota/drones/g’ you get some similar situations in more current battles.
gamescr · 3h ago
> in the modern Fallout games2 the only vehicles of gameplay import are aircraft. The existence of ground vehicles is implied in dialogue, but we never see them, presumably because they’d be too difficult to implement in the engine.
It's more of a game mechanics issue than technical, there is a lot of rubble, obstacles and destroyed roads, specially the highways. Vehicles also make the world smaller. It might be fun anyway.
johnea · 5h ago
As the article's first comment states, and what was my first criticism after seeing Madd Max years ago: Who's refining the gas?
Let's just call it what it is: The whole premise is stupid, and was the biggest detractor from "suspension of disbelief" while watching the movie.
This is the same stupidity that's causing rural residents to shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to adopt electrification.
There is NO other technology that allows the level of technical autonomy, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, that is afforded by electricity.
People with rural acres could be supporting ALL of their own residential and agricultural energy consumption with onsite electrical generation. Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.
duped · 1h ago
In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device
I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.
lurk2 · 5h ago
> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.
The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.
nine_k · 5h ago
It's a funny position to have lost faith in the industrial society and drive a truck that depends on it heavily for spare parts and daily fuel. I bet they also watch TV a lot.
A horse-drawn buggy would be a consistent (and sustainable) choice, instead of a truck. Preppers and rednecks are quite distinct though.
AngryData · 2h ago
Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn.
I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state.
There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.
rightbyte · 5h ago
Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from.
Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.
decimalenough · 4h ago
Because it looks cool.
There's a scene in Fury Road where a muscle car type vehicle blows up in such a way that it's propelled high up into the air, and then blows up again in mid-air. The physics to make this possible exist only in Hollywood, but hey, this way you get two pretty explosions.
I go to the movies for physics-defying aesthetically overwhelming explosions. For all-too-physics bound and far scarier crashes, I drive the Garden State Parkway.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 4h ago
Shits so fun is why
giraffe_lady · 4h ago
The Miocene Arrow is an interesting post apocalyptic novel that takes this problem seriously. In it a neofeudal society is oriented around producing surplus grain and processing it into alcohol for small diesel-powered airplanes, maintained in small numbers at vast expense by an aristocratic class as both symbol and means of enforcing their dominance. Entire hereditary craft guilds for all the support and subskills necessary to keep them running etc. Sort of analogous to warhorses in premodern europe I guess. Solid book, the first one in the series is interesting too but based in a different setting.
awnird · 4h ago
The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 51m ago
Once again everyone has underestimated the cunning Toyota Prius, especially the new plug-in model, the Prius Prime.
Your gas went bad a year after the hammer fell? The Prius Prime can drive highway speed on its battery, and you can charge that with solar and an inverter.
Need to break camp and make yourself scarce in 5 minutes? Toss some fuel tanks in the back and floor it. The Prius Prime has a 600-mile EPA range on gasoline.
ivape · 4h ago
You can't believe they just had a large amount of oil left over from the apocalypse that could sustain a few hundred thousand people? It's just a matter of cartelling it and controlling the supply.
If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.
Filligree · 3h ago
Oil? Sure, but you can't burn raw oil for anything more interesting than pure heating.
Refined gasoline, diesel or even propane? That stuff degrades. After a few years it's useless.
[1] https://angrystaffofficer.com/
"Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – an Army’s Role"
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2025/03/02/failure-mechanisms-...
I submitted it now for discussion on its own:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084653
It's more of a game mechanics issue than technical, there is a lot of rubble, obstacles and destroyed roads, specially the highways. Vehicles also make the world smaller. It might be fun anyway.
Let's just call it what it is: The whole premise is stupid, and was the biggest detractor from "suspension of disbelief" while watching the movie.
This is the same stupidity that's causing rural residents to shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to adopt electrification.
There is NO other technology that allows the level of technical autonomy, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, that is afforded by electricity.
People with rural acres could be supporting ALL of their own residential and agricultural energy consumption with onsite electrical generation. Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.
I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.
The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.
A horse-drawn buggy would be a consistent (and sustainable) choice, instead of a truck. Preppers and rednecks are quite distinct though.
I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state.
There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.
Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.
There's a scene in Fury Road where a muscle car type vehicle blows up in such a way that it's propelled high up into the air, and then blows up again in mid-air. The physics to make this possible exist only in Hollywood, but hey, this way you get two pretty explosions.
Your gas went bad a year after the hammer fell? The Prius Prime can drive highway speed on its battery, and you can charge that with solar and an inverter.
Need to break camp and make yourself scarce in 5 minutes? Toss some fuel tanks in the back and floor it. The Prius Prime has a 600-mile EPA range on gasoline.
If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.
Refined gasoline, diesel or even propane? That stuff degrades. After a few years it's useless.