I miss that bike sometimes.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_Mark_2#Portrayal_in_med...
I have converted modern cars to points and carbs, its not that difficult. No reason you couldnt drive any car with some motorcycle carburetturs clamped to the intake runners. Hardest part is spinning the rotor and remembering how to set your points. Never drive-by-wire cars will need a throttle cable, and a manual transmission is the only electronics-free option. I have heard a simple mechanical relay logic system can control many autos, but have never tried.
The ignition coil will probably not survive an EMP event, so the bike will not run.
However, it should be pretty straight forward to wind a new ignition coil if you ever find yourself in a post-nuclear situation.
A distributor is only there to distribute the spark to the cylinders. On modern engines the distributor has been replaced by individual coils (on per cylinder).
This setup is even used on modern-ish vehicles, where two transistors drive two coils to run four cylinders.
Unless your car is very old, chances are that you have a more reliable reluctor-based ignition, where instead of points you have a magnetic pickup that's triggered by a toothed wheel on the distributor shaft. That pickup drives an ignitor (which may also be inside the distributor, or it might be a separate module) which generates the high current input to the ignition coil primary.
You can twist the distributor to change your base timing, plus you have the vacuum mechanism that moves the points or magnetic pickup to adjust timing according to manifold vacuum, and it probably also has sprung weights that swing out as rpm increases, which moves the cam or reluctor wheel to advance timing.
The actual distribution part of the distributor consists of the rotor and terminals on the cap. That's what routes high voltage from the coil out to each spark plug.
On an old motorcycle, you just have the points (one set for each coil for each pair of cylinders as described above) without the distributor cap and rotor part. You can move the points around the cam to adjust base timing, and you might have springs and weights to advance timing as rpm increases. I don't think vacuum advance was nearly as common on bikes as it was on cars.
And while the ignition cam may or may not be near the alternator or generator, it has nothing to do with it functionally.
Also, I forgot that some old Harleys have the points in a housing sticking up above the crankcase. It's debatable if this should be called a distributor though, since the spark plug wires don't go anywhere near it.
The purpose of a distributor on a car was to distribute the output of one coil to several spark plugs. When you have a separate coil output for each plug, there's no need to distribute anything.
The trucks were equipped with some type of an emergency throw should that situation ever arise. We never had to use it in my time there.
Since at least the ~2000 era, a VW diesel will run with no alternator (for a while) but not without a battery.
It's one of the last types of Mercedes which were meant to go through WWIII and back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_OM616_engine
Different kind of bike, but I used to feel that way about my bicycles. However, sometime last year I was parking at the office and realised even that world is on its way out.
The No-True-Scotsman actual cyclists have largely moved to electronic shifting and such, and the utility bikes are quickly moving to e-bikes.
Not true at all.
Electronic shifting is a thing, yes: google for "Shimano Di2". However, road bikes with this are usually at least $4k: it's really something reserved for very high-end road bikes. I got a $3k road bike last year and it doesn't have it, nor does anything else in the low-to-mid range. It'll likely be a while before it comes to low-end road bikes (which are generally still "high end" compared to cheap Walmart bikes)
>and the utility bikes are quickly moving to e-bikes.
Again, not really. There's at least an order of magnitude difference in pricing between a regular utility bike and an e-bike. I've been to cities recently where many, many people commute by bike, and only a very small percentage are e-bikes, though they are getting more popular, but still they're a LOT more money than a regular cheap bike.