I wasn’t talking about making diesel at home. That’s pretty much the immediate aftermath of a collapse.
In the case of a societal collapse, eventually, new city states will be formed using salvaged technology and eventually technology produced of their own. My argument stands that to restart civilization, you will more quickly go back to fossil fuels, which are simpler to salvage, manufacture and utilize than high tech solar panels and batteries.
This includes gas vehicles. It’s just a fact that electric vehicles and semiconductor technology are luxuries of the modern era and not long term post apocalyptic tools of survival due to their manufacturing difficulties, durability and maintenance necessities. Just as an example you have Toyotas from the 60s that can still work just fine and i guarantee you a Tesla made today won’t work in 60 years, unless you replace nearly every electronic component of which it depends.
I’m all for renewables and sustainability and ditching fossel fuels, but from an engineering point of view, i just don’t think I’d be trusting in electrical vehicles and semiconductor tech in a post apocalyptic scenario. The reliability just isn’t there.
And diesel generators/fuel refining is most definitely not more difficult to manufacture than semiconductors. Just to make a simple silicon wafer you need more tech than to make a piston engine. Let alone doping it to produce enough photoelectric effect to power stuff with. There’s a reason we more quickly figured out diesel/gasoline engines than semiconductors. You need clean rooms, high tech engineers and a lot of robotics for things we can’t do with enough precision with our big clunky hands at the nano scale. With piston engines a workshop will do and fuel refining is just basic fractional distillation. As a side note, i could most definitely refine diesel at home. I’ve distilled things more complicated than diesel. But that’s beside the point. I understand you meant the average person with no training wouldn’t be able to do it and i understand and agree.
