Biden’s gasoline sale likely won’t have a major impact on summer pump prices
A sign displays gas prices at a gas station on May 21, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
The Biden administration’s move to sell 1 million barrels of gasoline from a reserve in the Northeast is unlikely to have a substantial effect on pump prices as summer driving season gets underway, according to market analysts.
The Department of Energy said Tuesday the sale would be timed to have a maximum impact on prices this summer with deliveries completed before the Fourth of July holiday.
But the barrels in the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve are equivalent to just 2.65 hours of total U.S. gasoline consumption and two or three days in the areas where the gas is stored, said Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.
“It’s not going to be a huge needle mover,” de Haan said, though the sale could provide 5 cents to 10 cents of relief in the Northeast where the gasoline market is historically tight.
“This is not going to be huge party at the pump,” the analyst said.
The motorist association AAA agrees, with spokesman Andrew Gross saying the sale might “help stave off any regional pump price surges, but likely won’t move the national average that much.”
Gas prices trending lower
Oil prices surged last month as Israel and OPEC member Iran stood on the brink of war, raising concern at the White House that gasoline prices could jump heading into the summer.
But gas prices have been trending lower for weeks now as demand has softened and U.S. oil prices have pulled back 11% from April highs after a broader conflict in the Middle East was averted.
Prices at the pump are averaging about $3.61 per gallon nationwide heading into Memorial Day weekend, around five cents lower than the average last month, according to data from the motorist association AAA. However, current prices are still roughly five cents higher than the year-ago average.
When adjusting for inflation, pump prices are about 2% lower compared to last year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
RBOB
The gasoline sale announced by the Biden administration fulfills a mandate passed by Congress in March to close the Northeast Reserve this year.
De Haan said the reserve didn’t make financial sense to begin with. It was set up in in 2014 in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which knocked out refineries and caused chaos at the pump.
But the reserve cost taxpayers $200 million just to maintain while the gasoline in the stockpile is only worth about $103 million right now, de Haan said.
“I don’t like the political victory lap,” he said of the Biden administration’s announcement. “It didn’t make sense to have this reserve. [Former President Donald] Trump tried to shut it down in 2020. Congress now approved it being shut down.”
De Haan said the summer driving season is already getting off to a “soft start,” with gasoline demand about 8% lower through Thursday compared to the year-ago period. Even in costly California, gasoline prices are down about 27 cents over the past four weeks, he said.
WTI v. Brent
“We know a lot of folks are saying they’re going to be traveling for Memorial Day,” de Haan said. “That would just imply to me that more people may be flying than driving this time around.”
AAA, however, is forecasting a record 38 million drivers will take to the road this weekend, a 4% increase compared to last year. This could move prices slightly higher, the group said.
But de Haan said gasoline prices will likely edge lower through the Fourth of July holiday as refiners increase output, which should keep downward pressure on pump prices.
For July, GasBuddy is forecasting prices in a range of $3.39 to $3.72 per gallon on average nationwide. De Haan expects prices to be in the lower half of that range and generally sit in the mid-$3 range.
“Since the pandemic, the summer driving season has not seen a surge in demand, which can push pump prices higher,” said Gross, the AAA spokesperson.
Hurricane season wildcard
The gasoline price outlook becomes more uncertain heading into Labor Day on Sept. 2. Hurricane season in the Atlantic is expected to be extremely active this year, according to forecasts from Colorado State University Tropical and Weather Climate Research.
The Colorado university report is forecasting 11 hurricanes this season, the highest number ever issued in its April outlook due to extremely warm sea surface temperatures and the likely development of La Niña conditions. There is a 42% chance that a hurricane makes landfall in the Gulf Coast, the hub of U.S. oil infrastructure, CSU found.
If a major hurricane knocks refiners offline, gasoline prices could rapidly spike 50 cents a gallon for a month or two before returning to normal, de Haan said.
“Anyone traveling or planning a late-season road trip needs to be watching the Gulf of Mexico and watching the Atlantic because we’ve seen profound impacts from hurricanes on refiners before and that’s a worry for the closing innings of summer,” he said.
Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.
Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.
And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.
The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.
Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.
This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.
One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.
Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.
The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.
Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.
Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.
xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.
So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.
Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.
In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:
Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.
But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.
This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.
We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).
We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.
In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.
That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.
In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.
So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?
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The off-highway equipment experts at Perkins and McElroy have teamed up to develop a plug-and-play battery electric power unit designed to help equipment OEMs and upfitters to seamlessly transition from diesel to battery electric power.
Designed to occupy the same space as the companies’ diesel-engined power units, Perkins dropped its new battery power unit into the similarly new McElroy TracStar 900i pipe fusion machine (specialized equipment used to join thermoplastic pipes like HDPE or polypropylene by heat-welding them end-to-end to form a continuous length pf pipe).
Perkins’ battery electric power unit replaces the company’s proprietary 134 hp, 3.6 liter 904 Series Tier V diesel engine, enabling units that are already deployed to be quickly upgraded to electric power – and helping trade allies and development partners to easily retrofit existing equipment in order to add zero-emission options to their operational fleet.
“We’re actively helping customers navigate the shift in power system requirements, with a range of advanced power systems including electric, diesel-electric and alternative fuel compatible engines,” says Jaz Gill, vice president, global sales, marketing at Perkins. “When it comes to the innovative fully integrated battery electric power unit, it can be ‘dropped in’ to a machine to replace a diesel engine. The system consists of a Perkins battery along with inverters, motors and on-board chargers – all packaged up into a compact drop-in system to support seamless transition from diesel to electric for our customers looking to make that move.”
McElroy believes that an electric, emissions-free power unit like this one will open new opportunities and applications for its customers.
“Their team has done a phenomenal job of integrating their battery electric system into our TracStar 900i,” explains McElroy President and CEO Chip McElroy. “We’re really excited to see what the market thinks about this concept.”
Development of the battery electric powered pipe fusion machine was completed in about nine months. Future Perkins-powered electric equipment running the 904 diesel (small excavators, telehandlers, pumps, and gensets) could be developed even more quickly. You can find out more in the company’s promo video, below.
Perkins electric power unit
SOURCE | IMAGES: McElroy, Perkins.
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British ultra-luxe brand Bentley is teasing the upcoming, first-ever all electric model that will take it into the 2030s with a new concept car inspired by the iconic 1930 “Blue Train” Speed Six coupe – and it looks fantastic!
More than any other brand, Bentley was defined by its engine. For decades, in fact, the only meaningful mechanical difference between a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley was the 6.75L twin-turbocharged V8 engine under the flying B hood ornament.
That all changed at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Rolls-Royce was acquired by BMW, while Volkswagen took the reins at Bentley, setting both brands on distinct paths. Now, without its own engine, Bentley faces the challenge of proving to discerning buyers that its cars justify a premium over its mechanical cousins at VW, Audi, and Porsche. That’s why the company is looking to it pre-Rolls merger past, all the way back to the legendary 1930 “Blue Train” Speed Six coupe.
Bentley Blue Train EXP 15 concept
“Bentley’s then-chairman Woolf Barnato had a Speed Six four-door Weymann fabric saloon by H J Mulliner, which he used to race the Blue Train in 1930,” explains Darren Day, Bentley’s Head of Interior Design. “Meanwhile, he had a unique one-of-one Speed Six coupe being built, with a body by Gurney Nutting. Even though the coupe wasn’t finished when the race took place, it’s that car (the coupe) that’s become associated with it and has since become an iconic Bentley. What we were influenced by is the idea of a three-seat car with a unique window line and super slick proportions used for grand tours.”
The EXP 15 concept car features a unique, three-door, three-passenger layout under a sweeping, dramatic roofline lifted from the 1930 tourer. “The seat can rotate and you step out, totally unflustered, not trying to clamber out of the car like you see with some supercars,” continued Day, before dropping the biggest hint yet as to who they’re building the car for. “You just get out with dignity and the Instagram shot is perfect.”
Bentley EXP 15 interior
While almost no technical specs have been revealed other than “full electric,” Bentley says its new concept’s innovative interior layout allows passengers to stretch out in comfort alongside accessible storage compartments that can house a bar, hand luggage, or even pets. The EXP 15 even offers tailgate seating for outdoor parties or suburban soccer games.
But, while the new concept is tall, Bentley hopes it manages to offer the commanding driving position and comfort of an SUV while giving off the “vibe” of a classic grand tourer – something Bentley thinks could be the next wave of the luxury car market.
“The beauty of a concept car is not just to position our new design language, but to test where the market’s going,” offers Robin Page, Bentley Director of Design. “It’s clear that SUVs are a growing segment and we understand the GT market … but the trickiest segment is the sedan because it’s changing. Some customers want a classic ‘three-box’ sedan shape, others a ‘one-box’ design, and others again something more elevated. So this was a chance for us to talk to people and get a feeling.”
As before: no specs, no range estimates, and no promises about if and nothing definitive about when the oft-promised all-electric Bentley will finally bow – but this is certain: when it does arrive, it will be big, brash, and fast.
Electrek’s Take
Now that SUVs are everywhere and in every segment, automakers are desperate to explore or open new niches, hoping to find that next “SUV-like” growth segment. As weird as the three-door, three-seat EXP 15’s interior layout is, you have to admit that it’s different. And, for a vehicle that spends 90% of its time with just one person inside it, it might be more than practical enough.
Let us know if you think Bentley has a winner, or just another concept car gimmick on its hands in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Bentley.
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