What Car Enthusiasts Would Actually Drive If Gasoline Disappeared Tomorrow

Gas prices hit $6 a gallon in Los Angeles. Toyota just announced a $4.3 billion profit hit. Spirit Airlines went belly-up. The world feels like it’s genuinely running out of fuel, so Jalopnik posed a thought experiment to its readers: If gasoline vanished tomorrow, what would you actually drive?

The answers ranged from pragmatic to absolutely unhinged. And that’s exactly what made them fascinating.

The Diesel Evangelists Have a Point

Multiple readers went straight for diesel, and they weren’t wrong. A W221 Mercedes S-Class running on good old diesel fuel is a legitimately viable post-gas existence—soft Nappa leather, cooled seats, and enough speakers to broadcast your survival advantage across the wasteland. One reader already drives an 1982 Mercedes diesel wagon on biodiesel (now called renewable diesel), suggesting they’ve basically already cracked the apocalypse code by converting to fryer oil.

The deeper insight here isn’t just that diesels last forever (though they do). It’s that diesel fuel has significantly better shelf stability than gasoline. In a long-term collapse scenario, stored diesel stays usable for decades—which explains why readers cited The Walking Dead logic. Meanwhile, regular gasoline turns to varnish in months. This is why a Volvo 940 diesel wagon—ideally imported from Europe where such things actually existed—became the recurring answer among pragmatists. These cars are simple enough to maintain without computers, efficient enough to stretch scarce fuel, and spacious enough to carry supplies. They’re the actual zombie-apocalypse vehicle.

The EV Owners Are Quietly Winning

What surprised no one but bears repeating: EV owners basically said “cool story bro” to the entire scenario. Multiple readers cited their existing Chevy Bolts, Tesla Model 3s, Subaru Solteras, and Equinox EVs, many already paired with home solar setups that cover 95 percent of their charging needs. One owner noted they haven’t even looked at gas prices in months.

This is the uncomfortable truth the oil industry doesn’t want you thinking about. If you’ve already gone electric and installed solar, the entire gas apocalypse is theoretical. You’re already living in the post-petroleum future while everyone else is arguing about diesel wagons. The smug is justified.

The pushback about “but what about the power grid?” gets annoyingly predictable, but the math works. A modest solar array plus battery storage actually does make a car functionally infinite-range once you own it. No fuel to buy. No supply chains to collapse. Just infrastructure you literally own on your roof.

Then It Gets Weird

This is where Jalopnik’s readers proved why they’re genuinely entertaining. Someone wanted to EV-swap a sand rail buggy using a Model 3 battery pack. Another reader planned to drop a Top Fuel dragster engine into a 1963 Ford F100 and run it on nitromethane while “ruling the wasteland with fire and chrome.” The nitromethane guy is my hero, even if his plan is completely insane.

Then you had the moonshiner with 120 acres who calculated he could theoretically plant corn, distill it into methanol over three years, and convert his V8 to run on homemade fuel while somehow finding time to operate a tractor and also survive. His response about using horses for farm labor instead of machinery—because horses are self-replicating and cheaper—showed genuine apocalypse thinking. This guy has thought about this way too much and I respect that.

A Stanley Steamer got a vote. So did a Razor Scooter from 2001.

The Bicycles Are Probably Right

Here’s where optimism about human ingenuity crashes into reality. Several readers went full pragmatist and said bicycles would “rule the wasteland.” Not because bikes are fun—because they’re the only reliable transportation when you actually factor in resource scarcity, maintenance requirements, and the hard truth that nobody’s maintaining a power grid for EV charging in a genuine collapse scenario.

One reader laid it out: Everything moves by truck. Agriculture requires fuel. The first months are about survival, not transportation. Regular power delivery becomes impossible. And then bikes win because they go anywhere, require minimal resources, and a fit person can cover 60-70 miles a day on human power alone. E-bikes got mentions too, paired with small solar panels and simple inverters for charging. This is the unsexy answer that’s probably correct.

The horse vote deserves mention here. One reader specified an 18-hand Percheron with 1,900 pounds of torque, runs on grass, and its emissions fertilize your garden. While you’re waiting for dead superchargers, you’re literally looking down at you from eight feet in the air. It’s the most condescending possible way to survive, and it might actually work.

What This Really Reveals

Strip away the comedy and you’re looking at genuine resource-scarcity thinking. Diesel cars work because diesel is chemically stable and simpler to synthesize than gasoline. EVs work because they eliminate fuel entirely if you own your power source. Bicycles work because they’re infinitely repairable and don’t require infrastructure. Horses work because they’re a closed-loop system.

What doesn’t work? Anything requiring a fragile supply chain. Anything dependent on software updates or grid connectivity. Anything that assumes abundant cheap fuel and electricity.

The subtext of the whole thread is that we’re already living in a soft apocalypse—gas is expensive, supply chains are broken, and the future is genuinely uncertain. So people are genuinely asking themselves: what actually survives when the comfortable assumptions vanish? A W221 diesel Mercedes looks pretty good compared to a new EV that needs a software update to start, but a Volvo 940 wagon is the actual answer because you can fix it with hand tools and patience. An e-bike paired with solar beats them all because it requires nothing from anyone else.

We’re not running out of gas tomorrow. But these answers reveal what people actually believe about resilience, technology, and the future. And that’s the real story.

Sources: Jalopnik