Public infrastructure for charging an EV in America is a mess. Executives have all been vocal and up front about it. So much so that seven of the world’s largest automakers formed a joint venture called Ionna to tackle the issue and stand up a nationwide charging network. Toyota joined the party a year later to bring the count to eight. But this isn’t just about selling EVs, it’s an entirely new form of business diversification. During an interview on The Drivecast Ionna CEO Seth Cutler said, “This is a for-profit business.” That business is EV charging. Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Cutler discuses Ionna needing to turn a profit below. “We know the company has to get to financial independence and profitability over time,” Cutler said. Currently Ionna exists off an undisclosed amount of money invested into the joint venture by BMW, Mercedes, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Stellantis along with Toyota joining a year later. At some point the faucet will be turned off, and Cutler, who has spent most of his career in the EV charging and energy vertical, knows it. Cutler said, “Infrastructure has to be for-profit or it’ll never survive, and if it never survives, EVs will never survive.” The approach to profitability and scale has been multi-pronged including various partnerships with Circle K, Wawa, Sheetz, and Casey’s. Beyond partnerships, Cutler said, “Very early on, we said let’s make some bets and plant some seeds for future trees. We’ve bought land at several dozen sites; we’ve built our own amenities where you’ve got buildings that we operate with vending machines, bathrooms, and other technology inside, like Amazon Just Walk Out; we’ve taken a piece of land, have a ground lease, and can come back later to add to it, add a building, or find a co-tenant. These things are all sitting there underground as seeds, but we’ve not focused time on that because it’s easy for an organization to get distracted and not have everybody working on driver quality and charging quality at scale. But we know that in 2027, 2028, or beyond, we’ll start to invest resources in terms of other ways to monetize or provide value to drivers with these things that we’ve developed that are different in the marketplace. But it is definitively not a focus right now.” Ionna isn’t alone in trying to build out a nationwide network of EV fast chargers to rival Tesla’s Supercharger network. Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe is making similar bets, though his focus is a bit more spread out than Cutler’s. Despite launching the R2 and being keenly aware everyone has ants in their pants for the R3X, a large focus is being put on building the Rivian Adventure Network (RAN). As of the summer the Rivian Adventure Network was a hair smaller than Ionna’s network today, and about 4% of Tesla’s Supercharger network. For now, Cutler was up front about the path forward, “My goal is to triple the size of the network this year from where we started at 80 at the beginning of the year. That scale isn’t baked into a lot of what people are seeing because we’re moving so fast right now,” he said.
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