When you think about it, it's sort of scary how dependent we are on wires. Now, hold on. I know that sounds like crackpipe talk from your least-favourite college dorm roommate, but there's something to all of this. If you look inside any new car, there's thousands of miles of wires. Your house? Lots of thicker, fatter wires that are buried inside walls. Even your central nervous system is a whole bunch of weird leaky wires that we don't really know how to fix. All it takes is for one of those conductors to get a little frayed or otherwise worn out, and you're in for a complete shitshow.
If you think about it this way, it's sort of remarkable everything works as well as it does. Only some thin plastic keeps an extruded length of copper from becoming A Major Problem, and it does so for billions upon billions of those extruded lengths of copper, every day. Now, don't have a panic attack thinking about that too hard. After all, the people who put all those delicate wires really close to salty roads sure didn't.
Every time I'm crawling under a car in order to replace some greened-up thinkin' rope, or cutting into a bunch of sticky electrical tape to find out which previous owner installed a stereo into the wire that used to make my speedometer work, I get a little grumpy about electricity. Maybe we would be better off without it.
That's why all those survivalists insist on having fully-mechanical diesels, so that they never have to worry about wiring ever again. All they have to fear in the event of an apocalyptic breakdown of society is getting a little bit of dirt or air inside one of the injectors. On second thought, I'll still take the wiring. If only because I hope that spending our waking hours hunting each other for food in a nuclear-blasted wasteland means that at least the city will stop salting the damn roads.
