There are weeks in business where everything you believed when you started a company gets validated in a single news cycle. This is one of those weeks.
The US-Iran conflict has brought oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz to a standstill. Crude oil peaked at US$120 a barrel. Australians are now facing the highest petrol and diesel prices since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 — and the response has been immediate, visceral, and telling.
Carsales reported a 76.7% surge in EV searches in a single week. Google data confirmed that terms like “EV Australia” and “cheapest EV Australia” are spiking in real time. At LEKI, traffic to our website is up 159% in the last seven days.
But before I talk about LEKI, I want to talk about what’s actually happening — because it’s bigger than a petrol price spike, and it’s bigger than one week’s worth of search data.
When Macro Events Permanently Reset Markets
History has a pattern.
Major disruptions don’t just change behaviour temporarily. They shift what people believe is normal, permanently.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, petrol prices surged and millions of Australians had their first real conversation about energy vulnerability. Not in an abstract, environmental sense — in a deeply personal, “I can’t afford to fill my tank” sense. That conversation didn’t end when prices settled. It lodged itself in people’s minds and quietly accelerated the shift toward alternatives.
When COVID closed bank branches overnight, digital banking stopped being a preference and became a necessity. Within months, people who had resisted online banking for years weren’t just tolerating it, they preferred it. The disruption didn’t just accelerate adoption; it changed the baseline.
Solar power. Remote work. Online retail. In every case, the tipping point wasn’t the technology improving dramatically. It was the outside world making the status quo unbearable.
That’s what’s happening right now with petrol.
The Maths that’s impossible to ignore
The Electric Vehicle Council put out analysis this week that cuts through all the noise. At $3 per litre — where prices are heading — a petrol car costs 34 cents per kilometre to run. Even at the current $2 per litre, you’re paying 22 cents per kilometre.
A LEKI Electric Motorbike costs $2.33 per 100km.
That’s not an off-peak charging rate. That’s not a solar bonus. That’s full tariff electricity, charged at home, any time of day.
When you put those numbers side by side, this stops being a conversation about values or the environment or being an early adopter. It becomes a very simple question: why are you still paying more?
And Australians are starting to ask that question in enormous numbers. According to the Electric Vehicle Council, 11.8% of all new cars sold in Australia in February were battery electric vehicles — a record monthly share. Over all of 2025, EV sales surged 38% compared to the prior year. The trajectory was already clear before this week’s supply shock.
Now, it’s undeniable.
Why We Built LEKI
We didn’t build LEKI in response to this week’s headlines.
We built it knowing this moment was coming.
Knowing that as long as Australians depend on petrol, they will always be one conflict, one supply shock, one bad week in the Middle East away from paying more just to get to work. Knowing that the current system, in which your cost of commuting is dictated by geopolitical events on the other side of the world is fundamentally broken.
We also built it knowing that the shift to electric wouldn’t happen because of ideology. It would happen because of economics. Because one day, the maths would become so obvious that it couldn’t be ignored.
That day is today.
What This Moment Means
People who had been curious are now serious. People who had been sitting on the fence are now doing real research. And people who had never considered electric transport before are suddenly running the numbers for the first time.
When they run those numbers, they find us.
A LEKI isn’t just a response to high petrol prices. It’s protection against the next supply shock, and the one after that. It’s the ability to charge at home, on your own terms, at a cost that doesn’t change when a tanker can’t get through a strait in the Persian Gulf.
It’s $2.33 per 100km, today, tomorrow, and regardless of what happens in the world.
The Before and After
Every major disruption creates a before and after. A moment where the old normal stops feeling acceptable and a new one begins.
The people searching for EVs this week aren’t just reacting to a petrol price. They’re recalibrating. They’re asking themselves whether the way they’ve always done things still makes sense. And for many of them, the answer is shifting.
We are at the before and after right now.
If you’ve been thinking about making the switch to electric, there has never been a clearer moment to do it. Not because we’re telling you to — but because the numbers are telling you to, and those numbers aren’t going to get more forgiving.
