Here are some excerpts from an Automotive News Ionna article this week:
Since
its founding in 2023, Ionna has opened 49 locations across the country, with more in progress. The company has 120 locations with 1,200 bays under construction or completed.
Ionna has sites for about 4,000 charging bays under contract and says it aims to have 1,000 operational by year end.
Getting to its 2030 target of 30,000 will require exponential growth, but
CEO Seth Cutler says Ionna has not wavered from its vision.
Even that is smaller than Tesla’s network of Superchargers today, and Tesla isn’t showing signs of letting up on the infrastructure buildout that represents one of its biggest advantages. According to a report by EV data analytics firm Paren, Tesla has about 53 percent of the market with more than 34,000 fast chargers, adding 1,820 in the third quarter.
Tesla will continue to dominate the market, in part because it needs to build more chargers to meet demand from its own EV owners and as it expands access to EVs from other brands, said Loren McDonald, CEO and chief analyst of EV analytics firm Chargeonomics. McDonald forecasted Tesla will have more than 69,000 charging plugs by 2030, while Ionna will reach the No. 2 spot with more than 25,000.
“To go from zero to second place behind the behemoth and well ahead of anybody else, it’s massive,” McDonald said, though success is “not guaranteed.”
“We’ve literally gone from zero to whatever miles per hour you want to equate that to in a really, really short period of time,” Cutler told Automotive News at Ionna’s headquarters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
“We are over 10 percent of the bays needed under contract, and we’re moving at a pace where that’s going to continue to rise at a faster clip than it has before,” he said. “As we acquire them, we’re able to move them through permitting into construction faster. So I think next year is really going to be around growing the network faster than this year.”
Ionna is targeting 50 cities across the U.S. for
its charging network, with plans to fill out major metropolitan areas, secondary markets and highway corridors. Ionna has acquired all the sites needed to create a “meaningful presence” in the first 15 metro areas, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Miami, said Aaron Wolff, the company’s senior vice president of strategic partnerships.
“We don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the closest thing to having a crystal ball is eight automakers who see what the future is looking like and what they’re building,” Wolff said. “We keep hearing go faster, go faster, and so we’re continuing to accelerate.”
The company is building three types of charging locations:
- Rechargery Relay, a smaller site of eight to 14 stalls without its own anchor tenant but near existing amenities;
- Rechargery, with 10 to 16 plugs and amenities provided by Ionna or retailers such as Wawa or Sheetz; and
- Rechargery Beacon, a flagship site with 24 or more stalls and richer amenity offerings. The first Beacon site is under construction near Anaheim, Calif., with an anticipated opening of late spring or early summer, Cutler said.
As many locations as possible will feature pull-through stalls and canopies, Ionna said, and all will have 400-kilowatt chargers. While Relay locations make up about half of those in operation today, less than 30 percent of the planned network will use that format, said Ricardo Stamatti, Ionna’s chief product and technology officer.
The company seeks to buy or lease property when possible but also will add chargers at existing retailers such as gas stations. Where the company acquires land, Cutler said, some could be reserved for future development.
That could deliver value and revenue for Ionna longer term, once the charging stations have achieved a proven level of quality that drives traffic, he said.
In the near term, Ionna is focused on efficiently increasing scale, Cutler said. It decided not to develop and release its own mobile app, instead opting to integrate with existing ones from vehicle brands and other providers.
“We’re not just marching toward scale. We’re marching to a place where we can say this is a profitable, sustainable business for the future,” he said. “Deliver value to the drivers and really deliver value to the automakers, so they can go sell cars and support their customers.”
Toyota Motor North America views its investment in public charging through Ionna as a long-term “strategic play,” said Gregg Swartz, the automaker’s general manager for EV charging solutions and battery lifecycle solutions.
Many automakers are working with Tesla to allow their customers to access Superchargers. Swartz said Ionna was attractive as a chance to build a reliable, quality competitor to Tesla.
Not only that, “we realized that customers won’t buy BEVs if they can’t charge their vehicle,” Swartz said. “This is a gap in the industry. We needed to address that gap, and we thought Ionna was the best solution.”
The investment from eight automakers, and those companies’ connection to drivers through the EV purchase process, is what sets Ionna apart, Cutler said. Ionna has installed charging equipment at each of the automakers’ facilities for testing and integration. The network is open to all EVs, not just those from brands that invested.
“It’s a startup that’s supported by eight companies that are very much not startups,” Robinson said. “That’s where I think the potential is.”
