The pitch for a nationwide charging network has always been dressed up as a public good. The top executive at EV charging startup Ionna would like to remind everyone it’s a business that needs to make money, or none of this works.
Seth Cutler, who runs the eight-automaker joint venture, told The Drivecast that the venture has no illusions about its mandate. “This is a for-profit business,” he said, and that business is EV charging. Cutler put the stakes bluntly: “Infrastructure has to be for-profit or it’ll never survive, and if it never survives, EVs will never survive.” He added, “We know the company has to get to financial independence and profitability over time.”
That matters because Ionna currently runs on an undisclosed pile of cash kicked in by BMW, Mercedes, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Stellantis, with Toyota joining a year later to round out the eight. Cutler, a longtime EV charging and energy hand, knows the faucet eventually gets turned off.
The profitability play is multipronged. There are partnerships with Circle K, Wawa, Sheetz, and Casey’s. Beyond those, Cutler described a quieter land grab: “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.”
Some sites are ground leases held for a future building or co-tenant. “These things are all sitting there underground as seeds,” Cutler said, but he was clear the company isn’t chasing them yet. The focus now is “driver quality and charging quality at scale.” The additional monetization comes in “2027, 2028, or beyond.”
For now, growth is the metric. “My goal is to triple the size of the network this year from where we started at 80 at the beginning of the year,” Cutler said.
Ionna isn’t the only one swinging at Tesla. Rivian is building out its Adventure Network, which as of summer was a hair smaller than Ionna’s and about 4% the size of Tesla’s Supercharger network. Of course, Tesla’s not just sitting on its hands, waiting for the newbies to catch up.
“We added over 2,400 net new Supercharging stalls, growing the network by 17% year-over-year,” the company noted in its recent earnings report. “We continue to innovate our Supercharger design and production process, helping us scale the network more cost-effectively. We are further reducing Supercharger wait times through improved Trip Planner, forecasted stall availability and dynamic waitlisting integrated into the Tesla app.”
There are also a slew of competitors looking to make inroads into the charging arena, or carve out bigger spots, like the Rivian, Red E, and more. The success of electric vehicles — spurred by the reduction of charger anxiety — begins with a big jump in availability, experts agree.
[Images: Ionna, Tesla]
Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
