The cars are almost 50 years newer, but the waiting lines outside some British service stations this week look like they’ve come straight out of the 1970s.

A shortage of truck drivers is hitting supplies of food and fuel. Some shelves in supermarkets are looking conspicuously bare, restaurants aren’t opening, pubs have run out of some beers, and a small number of fuel stations have been forced to close.

And to make matters much worse, drivers worrying about being left dry are panicking and filling their cars up whether they need to or not. According to BBC News, one petrol station in Stockport sold 24,000 liters (4400 gal U.S) on Friday, compared with 8,000 liters on the same day the previous week.

Edmund Kind of the AA claims panic buying is the real problem, but it’s an indisputable fact that Britain does not have enough truck drivers to deliver goods. And now Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering issuing 5,000 temporary visas to enable drivers from mainland Europe to fill in the gap. The visas would last until Christmas Eve 2021.

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That effectively means the British government is partially backtracking on one of the key points of Brexit, which was to end free movement of people between Europe and the UK. The irony of course is that the shortage of drivers is partially the result of Brexit, though Brexit supporters will swear blind it isn’t.

The trouble with Boris Johnson’s plan is that those 5,000 temporary visas could be a drop in the ocean. The UK’s Road Haulage Association estimates the country is short of 100,000 truck drivers. The average age of drivers is almost 60, younger British drivers are not joining the trade in sufficient numbers, and many of the European drivers who did work in the UK have returned home since Brexit.

Fortunately, experts think the immediate fuel crisis will be over soon. “The good news is you can only really fill up once – you’ve got to use the fuel, so this should be a short-term thing,” Edmund Kind told the BBC’s Breakfast TV show. But while it lasts, drivers of electric cars are going to feel rather smug as they cruise silently past packed (or empty) filling stations. Supermarket bosses, meanwhile, have warned Brits to get used to large gaps on store shelves for months to come.