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 been
00:11above four US dollars a gallon every single day of August, and AAA says this month is set to be
00:19the most expensive August at the pump in American history, period. It will beat the previous record
00:28from 2022. The average right now is $4.09 per gallon. That's around $1.08 per litre,
00:37or roughly $1.55 Australian, and it's up 88 cents, a 27% jump in just 12 months.
00:45Diesel is far worse. The US average is $5.61 a gallon, up nearly $2 in a year, a 51
00:57% increase.
00:58And because diesel moves every truck and ship on the planet, that cost flows into the price of
01:05everything you buy. California is averaging $5.65 for petrol or gasoline. One county is paying $6.81
01:14a gallon, and Californian diesel is sitting at $7.22. That's up 41% year on year.
01:21Yeah. That's painful. I don't know why you'd want to be having to deal with this if you didn't have
01:27to be. Here's the scary part. America's strategic petroleum reserve has dropped below 300 million
01:33barrels, and 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 a barrel. And it's actually global.
01:56Ironically, even though it's global, these oil companies are making more money than ever before.
02:03Here in Australia, unleaded petrol has been above $2 a litre since early August. That's for the
02:09regular crap stuff, with the capital city average around $2.05. Australia's about $1.44 US, and diesel
02:17averaging $2.52 a litre, partly because our fuel excise concessions have ended. Europe is actually
02:25uglier. The EU average petrol price is up over 20% year on year, and sitting within a cent of
02:33its 52-week
02:34high. And Danish drivers are paying the equivalent of nearly $11 US dollars a gallon. Call it $2.87
02:42US per litre. That's over $4 Australian dollars per litre. Little wonder that Danish drivers have
02:49moved to be almost entirely electric. I mean, last month, 97% of all privately bought cars in Denmark
02:56were actually electric. So people are going, whoa, hell, no, no thank you. Now think about what this
03:03actually means, though. An average American filling a 60 litre tank is handing over about $65 US dollars
03:09or $100 Australian every single week. An EB owner charging off home solar pays, well, close to
03:15nothing. And even off-peak grid charging costs a fraction of the cost of gasoline. AAA data already
03:23shows Americans changing their driving habits. This is exactly the mechanism that Tony Sieber described
03:28years ago. Every oil shock permanently pushes another wave of buyers into electric cars. And unlike the
03:3770s, this time the alternative is sitting in the showroom, and it's cheaper to run. Oil states can
03:44restrict supply, but they can't stop the disruption. They're actually accelerating. I mean, EV sales are
03:53skyrocketing this year. It's very clear why that is. Let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks for
03:59watching. On the Electric Viking website, I'll put a link in the description below. We have more articles
04:05about electric 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 into five
04:24languages, each with its own dedicated YouTube channel. Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, and
04:31Hindi. Full channels. I'm not talking subtitles. If you speak one of those languages or you know someone
04:37who 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. Brazil is one of the
05:07fastest growing EV markets on earth. And BWD is building cars there. Spain and Latin America are
05:13electrifying fast. Germany is the heart of legacy auto industry that's being disrupted. And there's
05:19a lot of people who speak German outside of Germany as well. And India is arguably the single most
05:24important EV market of the next decade. The audiences in those countries, they deserve their analysis in
05:31their own language. At least I think they do. You can already watch my videos on Bilibili, hundreds of
05:35them. I'd rather you watch them on a channel that I actually control though. And that's actually up now
05:41on Bilibili. I'll put a link in the description to that too.
05:49An 18-year-old kid from Palo Alto has just done something that most car companies can't do properly.
05:56He built a model that can tell you how healthy an aging EV battery actually is, with a prediction error
06:05of just 2.3%. His name is Colin G. Chu. He's a student at the Nueva or the Nueva School
06:15in California,
06:15and his work just made him a finalist in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, which is one of the
06:24most prestigious science competitions in the United States. Here's the problem he was attacking. You
06:30cannot open up a battery cell and look at how much life is left inside an individual cell. Well, you
06:36could, but it kind of destroys it. A battery management system has to infer the state of
06:42health from electrical behavior. And that gets really hard once the car is out in the real world
06:48with changing temperatures, different charging habits, different driving styles. And remember,
06:54this car could have been plugged into the grid. And you don't know that, right? If you bought an EV
06:59and it says it's done 60,000 miles or 100,000 kilometers, maybe it's been used as a home
07:06battery. And you don't know. So it could have actually done a lot more driving in theory than
07:11what the odominus says. So Chu took 22 batteries, deliberately aged them using electrical signals
07:18designed to mimic real driver behavior, and then built a framework that combines an equivalent circuit
07:24model, which is a physics-based way of describing how a battery behaves electrically. With machine
07:32learning regression, physics plus AI, rather than one or the other. And that combination is exactly what
07:41the serious researchers in this space say is the right approach. Now, this wasn't done in a garage.
07:47Chu did the work through Stanford Young Investigators program in Professor Simona Onov's Stanford Energy
07:55Control Laboratory. So he had access to some pretty cool stuff. If that name sounds familiar, it should.
08:03Anori's lab is the group that showed in 2024 that EV batteries in real world use last up to 40
08:10% longer
08:11than lab tests suggested. And more recently, that aggressive driving can degrade a battery up to
08:18two and a half times faster than gentle driving.
