Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

it's a little more complicated than that. check out the map of which states use gas stoves vs electric.

https://www.statista.com/chart/29082/most-common-type-of-sto...

"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

If that is true it is delightfully ironic. I have heard that the main reason the M1 has a turbine is that the army saw the dramatic improvement in reliability that turbines brought to their helicopters and said "that, we want that in a tank"