But the maintenance is really pretty simple, the biggest problem with any gas-burning vehicle would be that all modern gas will be more or less useless after a year or so.
I suspect the general maintenance of the gas generator is too much work for the common person e.g. changing oil, treating the gas if you are letting it sit in the tank for months, etc.
His point is that gas spoils. It polymerizes creating a bunch of hunk that clogs the fuel lines
This is something that post-apocalypse fiction usually gets wrong. After a year you would probably not be able to grab any random abandoned car and drive it (even if the battery held charge)
Cars don't care. They'll run on 3+yo gas (though I wouldn't risk it in anything that needs premium for reasons beyond the scope of this comment). It's stuff with carburetors that you have to worry about, particularly two strokes, marine 2-strokes seem even more finicky for whatever reason. Also, modern car fuel systems are well enough sealed that there's not much moisture ingress.
The whole "gas goes bad in X months" this is basically an urban legend at this point but it's continuously propped up because most white collar people's experience with gas older than a few months is trying to pull start some piece of garden power equipment that has the cheapest carburetor known to man on it, a compression ratio in the ballpark of "maybe" and barely runs on a good day and then can't start once you make the gas even mildly less volatile. Old carburetor vehicles could certainly gum up but they'll do that with premium too.
If you don't daily drive a moped, motorcycle or bicycle with one of those engine kits you'll be fine.
Source: Formerly employed in an industry where filling up your vehicle with free junk gas was one of the perks of the job.
Eh, people worry about this but in my experience with storing vehicles is that it's really not that much of a problem. I put a motorcycle away for 1 year with zero prep. Next year, fired it up, ran the gas through (it seemed a little sluggish but nothing that can't be attributed to placebo), and filled it up fresh. And that's on a carburetor motorcycle with transistorized ignition, which is going to be much more finicky than a modern fuel-injected car with computer-controlled ignition.
Yep, that'll also reduce the negatives of bad gas. Then on top of that you've got lots of detergents blended in these days to try and help prevent/cleanup that stuff, and modern ECUs can detect and dynamically remap when the gas is starting to go bad, etc.
Unless you're leaving the gas in your modern car for >~1yr I probably wouldn't worry about it too much.
The car takes care of that by keeping track of when you fuel. It will burn some of the gas to keep it from going bad, to keep the engine oiled, and occasionally to keep the vehicle warm.
The gas tank is pretty small (9 gallons), so it's not a big issue and only a tiny amount of fuel is used for these things. I normally keep about a quarter to half a tank in there, which is enough to be more than comfortable but not enough that I'm burning a lot of gas to keep it from going bad. It automatically keeps the average age of gas in the tank from going over 6 months.
Yeah, but we've had almost a century of experience dealing with that...
The issues involved are also very different. A tank of gas is actually a very stable thing. Barring a puncture, there's not much you can do to a gas tank to make it do bad things.
Cutting a gas line is no major concern. Shorting a high voltage/high current power line to the frame of the vehicle is putting a lot of trust in the batteries failsafes (that trust is almost certainly justified, but with a track record measured in years, not decades, you'll forgive us for being a little paranoid...).
>Can the gas in the tank go bad? I know modern fuel has a lot of preservatives.
This is something that is occasionally mentioned in speculative apocalyptic scenarios. It will go bad, after about a year you wouldn't be able to use any random car without swapping out its gas with some from a better preserved source.
Gasoline doesn't go bad that fast in a modern sealed fuel system and engines with modern electronic control systems that have a lot of latitude to adjust in real time are really forgiving.
People are mostly projecting their experience with much more finicky lawn equipment to cars.
I was trying to get a CNG car in California for a while and ran into the issue that the model I wanted was old enough that almost all of them had expired or near expired CNG tanks, the labor for replacement would be very expensive, but that really didn't matter, because new tanks for that vehicle were nearly impossible to find. It's not great that they're exploding, but turning into a pumpkin 15 years after tank manufacture really kills the utility. (Maybe it's easier to replace on cars other than crown vics though)
Not that bad in 6 mos, I parked my van for a year and a half and started up just fine with the 1.5 y/o gas and ran well after that - and the gas tank is no doubt a worse environment than a small dedicated sealed tank designed for the purpose.
I figure that finding somewhere to mount the tank would be a pain in the arse. Maintenance is far easier than with petrol systems because it's not constantly trying to set you on fire.
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