[Nowhere Man]

My old diesel car might be worth it's weight in gold in such an instance, if I could roll it downhill or somethng to get it started.

I think the metal in the car's body would act as a shield to protect any electronics in the engine. The radio, being connected to the antenna would be another matter though.

[blackdog]

Uhm........not so. The metal chasis on the frame is poorly grounded. Sure there is some carbon in the synthetic rubber tires to do some good, but from a technical standpoint to techno-geeks, your car is just a giant capacitor during an EMP and it will go "POP" when the pulse charges it up. It cannot discharge that fast.

I've been hit by lightning while flying and can tell you that energy will really do some interesting things. It made pinholes where it hit, but then inside it made what I can only describe as ball lightning which would seek corners where it would sort of oscillate and then dim. It lasted about five full seconds before the skin managed to discharge in the air.

[Arthalion]

I think the metal in the car's body would act as a shield to protect any electronics in the engine. The radio, being connected to the antenna would be another matter though.

The body metal MIGHT help if the body were grounded, but the bodies of most cars are probably too thin and radio porous (windows, under the engine compartment, modern plastic door panels) to effectively shield against anything.

By the way, if anyone happens to remember the old Fox show Dark Angel, it was built around this exact scenario. In that show, much of the US was EMP'd by terrorists and it basically threw the country back into third world status. When the power and transportation grids had been restored it was discovered that the pulse had not only wiped out the memories of every computer in the country, but also the backups. This may be bad for home users, but is an unimaginably damaging situation for a major corporation...imagine a company like Walmart, IBM, Merrril Lynch, or even Ford losing all of their payroll records, their inventory records, their AP records, their customer records...everything.

Nobody gets a paycheck, the companies can't collect on their debts and go bankrupt, and the whole economy collapses as a result. According to that story, it took years for the American companies that managed to survive the pulse to get back up to speed, and most of them discovered that foreign competition had filled their vacuum during that time and that they no longer had viable markets. It may have been fiction, but there was NOTHING implausible about the scenario.