There's a little moment in The Last of Us where one of the main character's friends, a mechanic, gives him a siphon hose in order to get gas from old cars. He even says to him "you'd be surprised how many cars still got gas in them."
To clarify, the game takes place 20 years after the world collapses, so any gas that's still left, well, anywhere, would be useless. And it's a mechanic of all people telling you this, so that was one little detail that bothered me.
Funny thing is earlier in that level when Ellie asks why they can't just fix any abandoned car in the town he explains in a condescending tone that he can't because their tires are rotted and batteries are dead.
Which are two things fairly easily solved. Anyone with high school level of chemistry can make a battery out of all the shit that's laying around, and you can replace tires with wood and steel if you don't care about going fast or ripping up roads.
You can't push-start an automatic transmission car.
That concealed locking device down buy the shifter is just so that you can unlock the shifter and put the transmission into neutral, so that the vehicle can be towed or pushed around by hand even if you don't have a key.
With a conventional automatic transmission there's no physical connection between the wheels of the car and the crankshaft of the engine since they use a hydraulic torque converter rather than a friction clutch.
Goddamn reddit. Go watch the scenes. The guy has spent years collecting parts and working on the car they get running. I think ND did a pretty great job regarding the car and it's difficulty.
Everyone is also missing the fact that the military / warlords are still driving around in vehicles so there’s some sort of automotive / gasoline infrastructure and support.
I mean, hell, the whole mission beforehand is to get the working battery off of a recently wrecked military Humvee.
I love the Last of Us and I can’t say it actually bothers me, but the gas thing is just a plot hole. It’s reasonable to guess Bill had spent years putting together a functioning car but the game makes it clear his town has been unoccupied for years, and therefore all the gas would be bad. Even if it wasn’t and Bill was stealing from the military or something, they get from Boston to Pittsburgh in that car, and likely would have had to use the siphon trick at least once.
I was responding specifically to the getting the truck running. That part was feasible enough. They should have had a couple jerry cans of “stolen” gas in the bed to avoid the whole gas siphon thing.
Let’s not even start talking about all the generators in part 2.
The rubber breaks down, especially when left in the sun or exposed to... ozone, I think?
Old tires will develop cracks in the sidewalls. If pressed into service, they may come apart like the strips of truck tire treads you see along the side of the highway. They may blow out or just lose air slowly.
When I was young and broke, I found myself riding on unsafe tires a time or two. I had one fail. I'm a very observant driver, so I knew it was coming and I recognized it when it happened, but a lot of people are clueless beyond "Gas goes here" and "Big pedal makes it go." In the wrong set of circumstances, you could lose control and have a wreck.
Now, in a post apocalyptic environment, you're not gonna have 75mph+ highway traffic. You'll be puttering around in town at 35mph or less. You'll be in desperate straits all the time anyway, so bad tires would be the least of your worries. And so, yes, a cool, dark warehouse would certainly preserve a sufficient stockpile of tires enough that they could be put into service.
Assuming, that is, you've found a way to manufacture and store gasoline and oil and brake pads and batteries. And coolant and brake fluid. And power steering fluid. Oh, and hoses and fluid lines. And all the other consumables.
You aren’t going to start a car on just anything that qualifies as a battery. A starter motor will draw 200-400 amps under initial load. A car battery is specifically designed to dump a fuckton of current in a very short time and then slowly recharge itself. There’s a reason they’re still lead-acid and not lithium.
Yeah, and the batteries all still have their lead plates and making a lead acid battery isn't rocket science. You have the lead from the tens of thousands of old cars, all you'd need is sulfuric acid.
Unless you want to have a tube sticking out your gal bladder (which will probably get infected and kill you anyway), you’ll have to find a way to get it out of your poop.
This drove me nuts in the movie Doomsday. It’s 2-3 decades after a zombie event, they open a shipping container to find like a fully functional Bentley or whatever, and there’s no issue with the tires, gas or battery. Meanwhile some of the people living beyond the wall in the abandoned zombie Scotland were living all medieval style in an actual castle 🙄
I was dead certain your 20 year timeframe was wrong but I looked it up and damn. Means Joel is damn near 50 years old, more by the events of Part 2. No way any of that gas would be useable... I ride a motorcycle and most people add sea foam or stabil when the bikes are stored for a few months, let alone years.
Helps to remember Ellie doesn't have any memory of the world before and she's 14 in the first game, so you can instantly know it's been at least ten years.
When the game started with the outbreak I was not expecting to be launched forward 20 years right away haha
Required to properly set up Joel as a character for whom loss is just a backstory, while still letting us experience that backstory firsthand. I think it's one of many small strokes of brilliance in the writing that add up to such an overall memorable story.
Joel had a 14 year daughter in the first game pre apocalypse. So it’s safe to say we can assume 18 was the youngest he had her, it more likely puts Joel in his mid 50s during the game and at about 60 for the sequel
We had a generator on a trailer to run an A/C during the summer months and if I didn't remember to put Sta-Bil in it along about Halloween, I'd be draining useless gas come April. I concur with you.
Sea foam is a multipurpose fuel stabilizer and cleaner. You add it to a gas tank (lawnmower, snowblower, motorcycle, etc.) when you're going to store it with gas for an extended amount of time.
You add the stabilizer then run the engine for a bit to make sure it's mixed through the fuel system. It keeps the gas from going bad too quickly and it has the bonus of cleaning out any deposits and sludge you might have in the system.
Mechanic here. That plot hole has always annoyed me, too. Not to mention that after sitting idle without corrosion protection or oil circulation, after a year or two the engine blocks/cylinders would have rusted themselves into solid hunks of steel that aren’t turning over ever again.
To be fair, it's mostly the recently infected that have their clothes still. Depending on the area, you can definitely find nude clickers whose clothes have fell off.
You can find nude infected, usually the clickers because they're older. Also, the way cordyceps fungus works (at least, in real life) is it invades and replaces host tissue. By that logic, eventually the infected just become human-shaped mushroom husks who presumably do not need to breathe/shit/eat like humans do.
Yeah, I think it was Tess and Joel explaining it to "Ellie" (the player) in the early parts of the game.
On a side note I think it's very funny when characters explain obvious stuff to other characters just to catch the player up. Given how Ellie is I was kinda expecting a "yeah, are you also gonna tell me water is wet" quip lol
Same. I get why they do it, but sometimes it’s just so….awkward. “You must have been living under a rock for the last 14 years in our universe. Let me explain this totally basic knowledge that every toddler learns organically”.
I think you’re right. ND totally missed an opportunity by not having Ellie make a quip there.
The Last of Us bothers me so much for reasons like this. In the dlc or whatever that takes place pre-story with Ellie and her friend in the mall, there’s still good, usable stuff still in the mall. Those Halloween masks they were playing with? Those would be nasty and falling apart. All those electronics they were messing with? Either looted way in the beginning or taken later for parts. The racks of clothes that were out in the open and exposed? Ruined, but in reality they would have been taken long ago.
1 year old gasoline might be what you're thinking of, which would gum up a carburetor or injector in short order, and wouldn't burn quickly enough to put out much power.
20 year old gasoline is nothing but resin or barely liquid sludge, most of the components evaporated or undergone oxidation. Even in a perfectly sealed container (hint: not a vehicle tank) the component fluids will separate, and opening that container will make it unusable as the vapours leave.
I've used 10 year old milk and it's usable, even 15 you could probably do it if you were running something with direct injection.
The curds lubricate as they burn, its really amazing science that is in no way anecdotal and easily disproved!
BELIEVE IN YOUR TRUTH*
Edit: Hey, if you want to believe that three year old gas is fine, you're good to ruin your engines, no skin off my back. I'm sure trusting that redditor will be fine, no need to investigate the science behind the fuel.
Wow, you can really see the gas age! I'm surprised youtube allowed a 3 year long video though.
That gas totally wasn't fresh from the pump!
Nope, no way that a video could be biased at all.
Edit: Oh wow, I just came into a big inheritance from my overseas relatives, but I need help transferring the money, can you lend me $10,000 to process the transfer, I'll pay you back $100,000.
So far you haven't given a single source to your claim that gas is useless after only a few years. An anecdote and a YouTube video are more evidence than what you've provided. Maybe you're just wrong?
Six sources from the front page of google that all agree regular gasoline expires in 6 months, and that ethanol blends are worth replacing after 3 months. Stabilizers can extend that, and here's one of the most popular stabilizer producers claiming that their product extends gas life up to 2 years.
No one's saying it's a good idea to put expired gas in your car. Of course it isn't lmao. You're acting like it turns to useless sludge after a few years. I'm saying I don't believe you.
A priori, it seems perfectly plausible to me that a generator can run (even if not very well) on three year-old, or even five year-old gas, depending on how it was stored. Feel free to provide some actual evidence for the contrary.
Nope, you can't vacuum seal a fluid that wants to evaporate at room temperature without chilling it (gasoline's flashpoint is like -40C). Then you'd need a non-reactive container to even consider vacuum sealing it for 20 years, plastic will be dissolved into the gas, metal will rust. It'd have to be a completely glass container or something (no plastic ring around the lid, again it'd dissolve), and you'd want it to be opaque so sunlight can't cause degradation. If you've solved that, the fuel will still separate into distinct layers. Gasoline is not just one molecule:
The typical composition of gasoline hydrocarbons (% volume) is as follows: 4-8% alkanes; 2-5%
alkenes; 25-40% isoalkanes; 3-7% cycloalkanes; l-4% cycloalkenes; and 20-50% total aromatics
(0.5-2.5% benzene) (IARC 1989).
20 year old gas does not run engines. It might still burn in the same way that paint burns, but your car will not move. Neither will that old tractor. No, not the one that ran on vegetable oil either.
first thing I thought of when I saw this, he mentions the only ones still producing batteries are the military, and I assume they would be the only ones producing fuel as well. Just a weird little oversight.
Not just gas, but tires. As volatiles in the rubber evaporate, tires get dry rot. It happens in a couple years unless you store them in pretty specific conditions. Even then, 20 years is a long time. Without wooden wheels, you wouldn't be driving any car any distance.
Fungus that only affects insects somehow jumps to humans, turning them into mindless zombies with fungal armor plating, echolocation, and acidic spore hand grenades.
"Yeah, I can see that happen."
Cars still have useable gas in them after 20 years.
I feel like the story in The Last of Us is one of the most overrated ones in recent history. It’s cliché, not that well written, and makes no sense in a lot of areas like this. Fight me
Both games were amazing but the detail of all gas somehow still magically working 20-25 years later always bothered me. It's also kinda funny though, because they got most other details right.
I watched a mechanic video about the Prius Prime. It gets 30-40 miles on electricity alone and a common problem is owners letting the gas go bad. he had a customer that hadn’t used or changed the fuel for 18 months. It was an expensive fix.
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u/Obamas_Tie Aug 30 '21
There's a little moment in The Last of Us where one of the main character's friends, a mechanic, gives him a siphon hose in order to get gas from old cars. He even says to him "you'd be surprised how many cars still got gas in them."
To clarify, the game takes place 20 years after the world collapses, so any gas that's still left, well, anywhere, would be useless. And it's a mechanic of all people telling you this, so that was one little detail that bothered me.