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Comment by occz | Hacker News Reader

For how long would cars really be practical in a "down in the bunker"-scenario, though? There wouldn't be any more fuel produced, probably, and cars require a fairly high standard of roads which also would be lost after not too long.

Personally, I would probably bring the equivalent book on bicycles, which I speculate would be the vehicle of choice for the end of the world. If anyone knows the name of such a book, I would be happy to hear it!

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Just looking through the table of contents [1] - this is not just for cars. It's basically a textbook on mechanical engineering, applied to something that will be common and very scavengable in a post-apocalyptic world. The first 159 pages is basically a quick-reference for applied physics; the next 50 pages is mathematics; the next 100 pages is material science. They don't get to anything car-specific until page 460.

[1] https://www.sae.org/images/books/toc_pdfs/BOSCH10.pdf

Why was this published? Bosch does not even make cars

Indeed, they only produce more car parts than any other company on this planet.

Bosch is a very large supplier for a huge amount of stuff in cars. Radars, other sensors, lights, ecu, brakes, hydraulics, gaskets, sealants, the lot.

Thank you for the link; yes, I laughed when I first paged across the book's reiteration of physical constants, the laws of thermo-dynamics etc. but in retrospect, it's helpful to have even elementary references when learning new concepts.

Engines can be modified to run on a lot of thing you can grow and process on a small farm. Maintenance would be an ongoing skill needed, so the role of mechanics and electro-mechanical knowledge would be highly valued again.

A harder challenge would be stripping out all the ECUs, computers and security crap to make things "just work" again.

All civilisations have been able to maintain their technology, but I think we are in an unusual and tremendously precarious point in history in the early 21st century. It seems far more likely that a loss of control over our technology will cause an apocalypse than that an apocalypse will cause us to lose technology.

>Engines can be modified to run on a lot of thing you can grow and process on a small farm. Maintenance would be an ongoing skill needed, so the role of mechanics and electro-mechanical knowledge would be highly valued again.

You could also drive things directly using a modified bicycle - see the Bicimáquinas-project from Guatemala: http://www.mayapedal.org/index.en

The idea is not to build a car just after you are out of the bunker. But it seems like this book would be helpful for a ton of useful things:

> thorough text covering not just cars, but their constituent parts--and their constituent parts' constituent parts--all the way down to the materials. It has wonderful tables of data on the properties of various materials (from advanced plastics and alloys to leather, paper, and common fluids) accompanied by clear and precise mechanical diagrams

The materials-part could probably be useful, but still, the utility of cars in a world where neither their infrastructure could be maintained nor their fuel produced is highly questionable. Bicycles are far less vulnerable, in my opinion.

You’re really getting hung up on the “car” part of it and not the “constituent parts”. This book would have everything required to build a bicycle.

Forget the car. The mechanical knowledge is the valuable thing.

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