I'm thinking it might be worth buying a larger car. In case I end up living in it.

I'm not sure how much of a good investment it would be. Back in the 1980s I drove to see the memorial built to Emilio Carranza, "the Lindbergh of Mexico," that's located at his crash site in Wharton State Forest, NJ. Before I found the only (still) maintained road to the site I tried one of the "forgotten" roads that was still on the map.

Not only do roads go back to gravel, but the gravel and chucks of asphalt gradually heave and shift (even without the help of vegetation). Until you see something that's gone it's hard to conceive of how bad it can go.

It's incredible how fast a lack of maintenance shows up. A Chevrolet dealer near me closed down earlier this year and the still-newish building and lots are vacant. Barely are we into summer and the yard is already splitting and sprouting with greenery. Any place there was a seam or patch in the asphalt there's weeds now. Even if an interstate or provincial highway is better constructed than a parking lot it doesn't take long for nature to do a number on the works of man, that's for sure. That and other things could create a surge of interest in smaller, fuel efficient SUVs along the lines of the old Land Rover products. 4 cylinder engines, small but robust body work, easy to care for. If it gets so bad that roads are left to go back to gravel then there won't be much need for going anywhere far will there? On the other hand the unemployed are available to scrape road beds, do erosion control projects and install and level cobble stones? ...okay, maybe not.

I experienced lack of highway maintenance first hand during the oil price collapse after 1985. I was living in Louisiana and drove LA-1 south of Shreveport to work. LA's revenue at the time was partly from oil and the state budget had to be cut. Many roads like LA-1 did not get resurfaced, but the top layer of asphalt was ground off in preparation for the eventual resurfacing that ended up being a couple of years away. Successive layers of asphalt peeled off and my windshield constantly got hit by flying asphalt. Needless to say that the road surface was very rough and potholed. Fortunately I-49, which paralleled the old road, was completed a few years later.

Westexas -

It doesn't even have to be a large SUV to have good off-road capability. An old VW Beetle set up as a 'Baja Bug' with raised reinforced suspension and huge tires, and upward pointing exhaust would do the trick nicely (though comfort might be an issue for many people). Ditto for dune buggies. Trouble is: Beetles (real ones, not the New Beetle) were once as common as stones, but these days nice ones are hard to find and are no longer cheap.

The German Army 'Kubelwagen' (bucket car) of WW II was based on the VW chassis and drive train, only weighed about 1,500 lbs, and could do anything the US Jeep could. They even had an amphibious version appropriately called the 'Schwimmwagen'.

Anyway, it's amazing how short a period of time it takes for roads and other infrastructure to deteriorate without regular maintenance. Once a certain level of neglect sets in, the process becomes almost irreversible.

We came to a similar conclusion while designing the UnCrash Course. My degree is in civil engineering, so I'm spending a fair amount of time at looking at infrastructure issues right now.

A few other points about our infrastructure to consider:

• U.S. roads are generally built as cheaply as possible (lowest cost bidder always wins); this is different from how the Europeans do it. The result is that without constant maintenance, our road quality quickly degrades. New rules were instituted in 2006 to build better roads, but of course that won't make a material difference to the situation in time.
• as Clifford Wirth points out, a few big potholes and "highway speed travel" lowers to just 10mph
• we have two replacement curves peaking for water pipes. The first are those placed at the beginning of the 1900's, with about a 100 year lifespan. The second is the post-WWII placements, with about a 40 to 60 year lifespan. Not only do I expect many catastrophic bridge failures, I expect our water systems to rupture so often that many places simply will lose running water because repairs will not happen quickly enough. Already we are doing "whack-a-mole" with ruptures due to fiscal constraints when we should be replacing or lining whole stretches of pipes
• without water, cities quickly become uninhabitable; disease spreads, fire suppression suffers and business generally stops
• The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US infrastructure a grade of D (I recommend watching their front-page video)
• Most water retaining structures (dams, levees) are coming to the end of their lifespan, too.

Here is slide from the course that helps make the point:

It's sobering to dwell on the amount of infrastructure that will be failing in the next decade if we don't make replacing it a priority.

As a suburban dweller outside Washington DC, it is amazing how quickly the roads near me have fallen into disrepair. My family has always joked that you needed to drive a truck to go into DC, but now they are increasingly useful all over the region.

However, I do agree with the Baja Bug idea too. In years gone by, I drove an old Escort on long-abandoned mining roads -- as long as you keep from busting the oil pan on a boulder and don't high center, you can take a car almost anyplace. As long as you have gas.

I sold my '93 Pathfinder a few years ago when it started having more problems. I ended up buying a '99 Honda CRV. (only after did I realize it only seemed to be little blue haired grannies that drove them - but I was being very pragmatic). It is still an AWD. It has a good brand name - Honda - (realible?). It also improved my milegae from 20 mpg to 30 mpg. Also it is still SUV'ish. It has the large rear compartment, which to Leanans point, I can sleep in the back and live in it if necessary. I'm thinking in a fast crash scenario, an SUV type vehicle is worth having.

I think that the true nature of the collapse we are witnessing is so overarching as to render our previous conceptions of preparation nothing more than abject folly.

The paradigm or world view that we shared prior to the onset of collapse has blocked us from making accurate calls on how it would actually unfold, instead we comforted ourselves with nonsense like walkable communities, light rail that would magically appear to meet our transportation needs, or the most ridiculous one of all, the election of a liberal democratic president who "gets it".
Throw in the acceptance of a crushing gasoline tax by an increasingly impoverished public to top it off and I rest my case.

In any case, it occurs to me that as roads deteriorate, an investment in a solid mid-size SUV might be a good investment--as long as one is to some extent still car dependent.

Only if your definition of an SUV is Simple Utility Vehicle... AND you know how to fix it yourself, and by that I mean have the capability of making your own spare parts. Do you have your own forge and machine shop? I don't even want to think about maintaining computers,electronic components, power windows and such. Good luck with your SUV!