00:00Something just happened in America that has never happened before in the entire history of the
00:04automobile. For the first time ever, the national average petrol price in the United States has
00:11been above four US dollars a gallon every single day of August and AAA says this month is set to
00:19be the most expensive August at the pump in American history, period. It will beat the
00:27previous record from 2022. The average right now is $4.09 per gallon. That's around $1.08 per liter
00:36or roughly $1.55 Australian and it's up 88 cents, a 27% jump in just 12 months. Diesel is
00:46far worse.
00:48The US average is $5.61 a gallon, up nearly $2 in a year, a 51% increase. And because
00:59diesel moves
01:00every truck and ship on the planet, that cost flows into the price of everything you buy.
01:06California is averaging $5.65 for petrol or gasoline. One county is paying $6.81 a gallon.
01:15and Californian diesel is sitting at $7.22. That's up 41% year on year.
01:23That's painful. I don't know why you'd want to be having to deal with this if you didn't have to
01:27be.
01:28Here's the scary part. America's strategic petroleum reserve has dropped below 300 million barrels
01:34and is projected to fall to 243 million. So there's less of a safety net than at any time
01:41in decades. The driver is, of course, the ongoing Iran conflict with tankers trickling through the
01:49Strait of Hormuz and bent crude sitting at around $93 US a barrel. And it's actually global.
01:56Ironically, even though it's global, these oil companies are making more money than ever before.
02:02Here in Australia, unleaded petrol has been above $2 Australian dollars a liter since early August.
02:09that's for the regular crap stuff with a capital city average around $2.05 Australian. That's about
02:15$1.44 US and diesel averaging $2.52 a liter, partly because our fuel excise concessions have ended.
02:24Europe is actually uglier. The EU average petrol price is up over 20% year on year and sitting with
02:32a cent of its 52-week high. And Danish drivers are paying the equivalent of nearly $11 US dollars a
02:39gallon. Call it $2.87 US per liter. That's over $4 Australian dollars per liter. Little wonder that
02:48Danish drivers have moved to be almost entirely electric. I mean, last month, 97% of all privately
02:54bought cars in Denmark were actually electric. So people are going, whoa, hell, no, no thank you.
03:01Now think about what this actually means though. An average American filling a 60-liter tank is
03:06handing over about $65 US dollars or $100 Australian every single week. An EB owner charging off home
03:13solar pays, well, close to nothing. And even off-peak grid charging costs a fraction of the cost of
03:20gasoline. AAA data already shows Americans changing their driving habits. This is exactly the mechanism
03:27that Tony Sieber described years ago. Every oil shock permanently pushes another wave of buyers
03:34into electric cars. And unlike the 70s, this time the alternative is sitting in the showroom
03:40and it's cheaper to run. Oil states can restrict supply, but they can't stop the disruption they're
03:48actually accelerating. I mean, EV sales are skyrocketing this year. It's very clear
03:56why that is. Let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks for watching.
04:00On the Electric Viking website, I'll put a link in the description below. We have more articles about
04:06electric cars and battery technology than any other website that I'm aware of in the world.
04:11So check that out. Link is in the description. And there you'll find our videos and analysis and
04:18articles about everything going on in the EV world. This channel is now officially translated
04:23into five languages, each with its own dedicated YouTube channel, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French,
04:31and Hindi. Full channels. I'm not talking subtitles. If you speak one of those languages or you know
04:37someone who does, the links are in the description. And subscribing in these first weeks will really
04:43help me. It'll make an enormous difference to how YouTube pushes them out. Because at this point,
04:48yeah, they haven't gotten a lot of traction yet. It takes a while for things to start. But anyway,
04:54we're putting a lot of work into making this, getting this content out there, making this happen.
04:59Why does this matter? Well, because the EV transition is not an English language story.
05:05Brazil is one of the fastest growing EV markets on earth. And BWD is building cars there. Spain
05:11and Latin America are electrifying fast. Germany is the heart of legacy auto industry that's being
05:17disrupted. And there's a lot of people who speak German outside of Germany as well.
05:21And India is arguably the single most important EV market of the next decade.
05:27The audiences in those countries, they deserve their analysis in their own language. At least I think
05:32they do. You can already watch my videos on Billy Billy, hundreds of them. I'd rather you watch them
05:37on a channel that I actually control though. And that's actually up now on Billy Billy. I'll put a
05:42link in the description to that too. An 18 year old kid from Palo Alto has just done something that
05:53most car companies can't do properly. He built a model that can tell you how healthy an aging EV
06:01battery actually is. With a prediction error of just 2.3%. His name is Colin G. Chu. He's a student
06:12at the Nueva or the Nueva School in California. And his work just made him a finalist in the 2026
06:20Regeneron Science Talent Search, which is one of the most prestigious science competitions in the United
06:27States. Here's the problem he was attacking. You cannot open up a battery cell and look at how
06:33much life is left inside an individual cell. Well, you could, but it kind of destroys it.
06:39A battery management system has to infer the state of health from electrical behavior.
06:44And that gets really hard once the car is out in the real world with changing temperatures,
06:50different charging habits, different driving styles. And remember, this car could have been
06:54plugged into the grid. And you don't know that, right? If you bought an EV and it says it's done
07:0060,000 miles or 100,000 kilometers, maybe it's been used as a home battery. And you don't know.
07:07So it could have actually done a lot more driving in theory than what the odominus says.
07:13So Chu took 22 batteries, deliberately aged them using electrical signals designed to mimic real driver
07:20behavior, and then built a framework that combines an equivalent circuit model, which is a physics-based
07:26way of describing how a battery behaves electrically, with machine learning regression. Physics plus AI,
07:36rather than one or the other. And that combination is exactly what the serious researchers in this space
07:43say is the right approach. Now, this wasn't done in a garage. Chu did the work through Stanford,
07:49Young Investigators program in Professor Simona Onov's Stanford Energy Control Laboratory. So he had
07:57access to some pretty cool stuff. If that name sounds familiar, it should. Anori's lab is the group
08:04that showed in 2024 that EV batteries in real world use last up to 40% longer than lab tests
08:12suggested.
08:13And more recently, that aggressive driving can degrade a battery up to two and a half times
08:19faster than gentle driving.
