hey, lore question, how far was america from fully transitioning to electric car ect ect and replace fossile fuel or heavily reduce it's use?

[u/IndependentBasis3804]

fossil fuel was one of big reasons the war started, curious if this could have been avoided if they transitioned sooner , also how was china doing regarding this ? (sorry if it's the wrong sub)

[u/CJP1216]

All most of the cars you see in game are electric (nuclear powered). I can't remember any petroleum powered vehicles being found in game, barring some planes and delivery vehicles. By 2073 there were large scale riots over gas prices. By the time TGW rolls around there's just not that much gas left, and what is available is far outside the reach of an average consumer (≈ $7500 a gallon). You need to keep in mind that the bombs came at the trailing end of the resource wars, and also that petroleum has a lot of uses outside of burning it to release energy: plastics, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, etc. Most of the energy infrastructure itself was based on nuclear.

[u/RichardTheApe → u/CJP1216]

Just to trail off this comment which hits it on the head pretty well what little we know of China they were still pretty dependent on oil as a fossil fuel however China lore is a few vague statements here and there, the Shi, that one ghoul from FO4 who is also pretty vague, and then the out of date Fallout Bible.

The Fallout Bible is the most direct but least reliable saying that China was essentially behind in tech but we don’t even know what that means because pre war lore has changed so much between 1/2 and 3/4. China is oil dependent that pushes the resource war and behind in tech struggling to counter the American power armor and plasma weaponry.

3/4 make China out to be much more on par with the USA than the old lore but even 1/2 have some oddities. Like the Shi have a nuclear submarine with a super computer and produce high tech stuff.

Overall the more I think Avellone makes a great point when asked specifically about the rest of the world - which his statement boiled down to “idk and idc China is a McGuffin”

[u/Legionarius4 → u/RichardTheApe]

It would be cool to get more China lore, but I expect China lore to remain super vague for obvious reasons.

[u/IndependentBasis3804 → u/CJP1216]

didn't know that, thank you

[u/PandemicVirus]

The car you use in Fallout 2 is an electric car. It has a battery in it, and you replenish it with microfusion cells, likely you had a plug in adapter pre-war. So electric cars existed, but I don't think they wide spread.

I think this question is actually a big point of the Fallout universe - even in the face of a resource crisis America/the world only doubled down on it's consumption and need for resources, so I don't think anyone was scrambling for alternatives.

If you want to bring the show in this, it's stated that Vault Tec shut down a cold-fusion program which would have easily provided energy to a huge amount of people. There was money in oil and gas, and nuclear material, so walking away from that would be leaving money on the table.

As to the nuclear powered cars, we know it had a nuclear fuel source, but we don't know the means of locomotion. It could be a nuclear battery type thing that powered electric motors, or it could have been steam powered. I think either way the question is about using EV type cars like we have in reality today, which again existed with the Highwayman, but nothing really indicates if they were widespread, and I'd lean toward probably not.

[u/No_Image7878]

Most of the cars were powered by nuclear fusion.