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The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture.
America’s path into the EV future alongside the rest of the world has been put on ice thanks to political winds, but automakers are keenly aware of the end game. Today might not look like tomorrow, and the topic of range anxiety, EV charging infrastructure, and charging times is enough to create a fight at the Thanksgiving table.
Automaker’s see the issue, and it’s large enough that seven of the world’s largest—BMW, Mercedes, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Stellantis—got together and created a joint venture called Ionna to build a nationwide network of fast chargers to rival Tesla’s Superchargers. Then Toyota joined a year later, bringing the total to eight. On the latest episode of The Drivecast, Ionna CEO Seth Cutler sat down exclusively with The Drive for a candid discussion about what’s taking so long, where are we today, and will EV fast-charging infrastructure really become what it needs to be in America to make the transition, and future, work?
Even though electric vehicle adoption has slowed in the US, it hasn’t stopped. Right now there are about 5.7 million EVs on the road here, with more being registered every day. Meanwhile, America only has about 250,000 public chargers to serve those drivers, and only 73,000 of those are the coveted DC fast chargers capable of juicing up an EV in less than 30 minutes. And as anyone who’s tried to use an Electrify America station recently can attest, it feels like they’re usually broken. The only company that’s really figured it out is Tesla, and although they’ve opened up their charging standard to other automakers, it’s still not enough.
The mission for Ionna was simple: build a reliable, high-powered electric vehicle fast-charging network across North America with at least 30,000 chargers and 2,000 stations in the U.S. by 2030 followed by Canada. Seth Cutler was appointed as Ionna’s CEO and tapped with making all this happen.
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Full Transcript
Kyle: All right, big day on The Drivecast. We have Joel back from fishing—he survived, hopefully caught a lot. And Seth Cutler, CEO of Ionna Charging, here to talk about why charging is the way it is in America and what they’re trying to do about it. Seth, welcome.
Seth: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Joel: Definitely welcome, Seth. And yes, I did catch a lot of fish—everything from crappie and northern to some perch and some amazing, beautiful walleye. I got a great 24-inch walleye; it was gorgeous. But we’re not here to talk about my fishing trip. Seth, you and I have met before. You crashed one of my interviews with one of your board members. It was a good time though; we had fun. Let me start there with the main tough question: why is America’s EV charging situation such an absolute hot mess? Like, why?
Seth: I think it boils down to probably two or three things. One is when you’re dealing with a nascent industry or nascent market, you’ve got new equipment coming to market, you’ve got not enough people staffed and trained on how to actually service that equipment, and there’s a lot of new technology interoperability—quirks in the system that have to be worked out. Honestly, having first-mover advantage isn’t always an advantage in a market. Sometimes being second or third is actually a bit of a blessing—better to be lucky than good, and I think that’s definitely helped us a little bit on the Ionna side. The second piece of that is really making sure that you’re building and focusing on the right things. It’s easy to get lost in, “Yeah, we’re just trying to put chargers in the ground to build out a national network,” versus “I’m trying to build out charging stations to service drivers and deliver an amazing experience.” While that distinction might not sound large enough, it definitively drives different behaviors culturally inside of an organization to deliver vastly different results to customers.
Kyle: Just to press on that a little bit, every industry has its challenges and its particularities, EV charging being a relatively new one, although not that new—I mean, the first public chargers appeared on America’s roads back in 2007, so we’re coming up on 20 years. You could argue that the first 20 years of gas stations were full of issues and a lot of learning happening. But I think from a normal consumer perspective, people who are not driving an EV or really knowledgeable about the space look at a gas station, look at an EV charging station, and a gas station seems to be a lot more complex in terms of the construction needed, the underground tanks, the environmental stuff, the fact that there’s a whole industry built around the convenience stores and the land and all that. EV charging, again from the normal consumer’s view, is just some cables. I know it’s more than that, but the point is, I think a lot of people don’t quite understand what’s taking so long. Why is growth where it is right now? Why hasn’t it reached the heights that were predicted five years ago?
Seth: It’s a great question. People often equate it to gas stations, but I’ve been much more equating it to cellular communications or cell towers. I remember my parents getting their first cell phone in the early ’90s as a kid, to 2026. Think about how many decades it took before people said, “Hey, I’m going to get rid of my landline and only rely on a cell phone as my only form of communication from a phone perspective, because I trust that it’s reliable and I have all the coverage I need.” It took probably 20-plus years, honestly. I think that’s very similar to what you see here: nascent market, not a lot of cars, so I’m not going to build 1,000 chargers in California at one time when there’s 10 cars on the road; I’m going to build just enough to survive from a capital deployment standpoint. It’s interesting to equate it that way when you think of it in that regard.
In terms of the complexity that goes into building these charging stations, there’s a few things that people don’t necessarily realize. One is, you’re trying to deploy an energy or power density in a footprint that people are normally used to deploying for a mall. You think about building out a mall, that’s going to take you three to five years. I’ve got to first design it, go through planning boards and zoning approvals, and then I actually have to build it. Construction of a mall could take a year or longer. When we sign a site for charging—not just us, but anybody—you could be shovels in ground after you get the permit within a week, and you could be ready for the utility to energize within six weeks. We’ve done sites in four weeks. Utilities just aren’t ready for that, they’re not used to that type of movement. The whole idea of charging, from signing sites and renting out parking spaces, to how you engage with utilities and bringing that much power to a small area very quickly, to the fact that a lot of these stations are unmanned—how do you make sure that irrespective of the fact there aren’t people there to keep an eye on the chargers and maintain them, you can build an operating model of data coming off these stations, telemetry, etc., to be able to remotely diagnose, monitor, and fix issues? Or having staff within two hours of every site built so that I can constantly fix these assets if they go down? It’s more than just deploying cables and wire and a post. It’s an entire industry that’s been developed in the last two decades for charging.
Kyle: That is good perspective. We’ll get back to the maintenance part especially, because that is one of the things I think people see the most: chargers that are out of order—not Ionna’s necessarily, but certainly a bad reputation the industry’s gotten off the start. Let’s get a little background to talk about Ionna’s growth specifically. The goal when the company was founded as this joint venture between seven automakers—and then Toyota joined—was put out for 30,000 chargers and 2,000 stations by 2030. Where are you guys at right now?
Seth: We’re at about 185 stations live to the public right now. It’s important to give history as well as to where the company’s at. We started operations as a company in February of ’24, so we’ve only been a company for two and a half years with building a team and everything else. We opened our first site a year and a half ago, so we went from zero sites live to about 180 right now. There’s another 100 sites in construction, and there’s several hundred more sites that are working their way through permitting, power, and about to start construction. We’ve got about 600 sites right now already contracted, and we’ll have probably another 100-plus contracted by the end of the year. We’re making hay in a short period of time. There’s still a big mountain to climb, honestly, but there’s been a lot of folks in this industry for a long time that have had big promises and big ideas. The thing that we’ve been heavily focused on, back to what we think makes us different, is a very strong attention to execution around the driver. That’s all that matters. We’re not working on battery storage right now. We’re not working on a mobile app. We’re not working on how to make more money from the driver lounges and how to sell more potato chips. All we’re working on is quality of charging at scale, and that’s how we’ve been able to move so fast in a short period of time.
Kyle: I’m jumping out of order here, but you just said something interesting I wanted to ask about. You mentioned potato chips. For gas stations, gas is not where they make their most money; it’s everything they sell in the convenience store. The margins on gas, especially for a solo station operator or small franchisee, are pretty small. As you guys have built out this Rechargery concept and tried to add more amenities and services to fast chargers, do you see that as part of the profit margin—offering all these other things that people then buy, even though the costs of utilities and electricity don’t leave a huge margin to build on?
Seth: I’ll answer starting this way: we know the company has to get to financial independence and profitability over time. This is a for-profit business. Infrastructure has to be for-profit or it’ll never survive, and if it never survives, EVs will never survive. 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.
Joel: Before we move on, I want to circle back to what you just mentioned about the 185 chargers. I interviewed Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe on The Drivecast a couple months ago, and he noted that—he’s been very clear about this throughout time, so this is not a new line—there are, in his words, two reliable and notable EV charging networks in America: the Tesla Supercharger network, which he’s been very kind in praising what they’ve done, and the Rivian Adventure Network, which as of June was 4% the size of Tesla’s, with Rivian having about 150 stations, just a little lower than the 185 you noted. He noted his goal is to be one of the largest networks in the US in the coming years, and the thing he leaned into specifically is the extremely high uptime. I’m curious about your reaction to Scaringe’s comments, given that you guys have a network just a smidge larger than theirs right now, and I believe you lean on the whole “we’re reliable, we don’t have an app” philosophy.
Seth: I have a lot of respect for RJ and everything that the guys have done at Rivian; it’s pretty tremendous, and the same thing for Tesla. On the Ionna side, J.D. Power ranked Ionna as number one in their 2026 study, and that’s based purely on survey results they get from drivers that they go out and sample. The J.D. Power recognition was a great way to independently say not only do we think we’re good, but drivers are saying that they think we’re good. We’re seeing that with higher utilization and a lot more organic traffic on social media of people talking about Ionna and the experience they’re having, so that’s really promising. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. I know we can do even better than we’re doing now, and we have a lot more sites to go build. Again, we’ve only been doing this for 18 months from when we opened the first site. If you looked at our network back in June, I think we had about 130 or 140 sites live; we had 80 sites live in January. We’ve more than doubled the network in the last nine months, and we’ll have well over 200 sites live by the end of the year. 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.
Kyle: Speaking of scale, it sounds like if this growth continues, you guys are on pace for this 2,000 charging station goal by 2030. But 2,000 charging stations leading to 30,000 actual chargers seems like a bit of a leap, considering a lot of these stations so far have between four and six chargers themselves. How do you get to that actual saturation of 30,000 chargers? Charging stations is a great metric, but the actual plugs are what makes a difference for drivers.
Seth: There’s always a debate: is it bays, as we call them, or plugs, or is it sites? What matters most, particularly in this market right now, is making sure that we have the right coverage for drivers across the country so you can get across states, but also inside of certain cities. We are heavily focused on making sure that when we deploy in a geographic area, we’re providing enough coverage that Ionna can be their network of choice. Look at Florida: we’ve got about 24 or 25 sites live right now in Florida. Looking at powered charging rates at 150 kilowatts and above, we’re the third largest network provider in all of Florida behind Electrify America right now, based upon the number of high-powered bays. That’s real market coverage. By the end of the year, we’ll probably have 30 sites live and a couple hundred more bays, which will put us in an even better position in that state. We’re doing the same thing in Dallas, Houston, and across California. We’re heavily focused on making sure right now that we provide densely populated areas with the right Ionna network coverage that they can rely on today.
Kyle: Speaking of, I have a little bone to pick with you, Seth. I live in LA, where there are, as of now, a grand total of zero Ionna chargers. I know a couple are being built, not really in LA itself, but more in the Southern California region. But Joel lives outside Minneapolis, where there are eight Rechargeries in operation right now, with a few more on the way. LA has four times the population of Minneapolis, and yet we have no Ionna presence right now. I keep looking because I see the pictures of these beautiful stations, but so far, no dice. Why is it that a city like LA doesn’t have a presence, and a city like Minneapolis seems to have a pretty high saturation? Are you basing expansion off perceived demand and opportunity, or just ease of construction?
Joel: We will accept the answer that Minneapolis is just a better place. That’s an acceptable answer on this podcast.
Seth: Totally fair. Early on, what I wanted to make sure of was that we could start to deliver results to the market in terms of chargers live. In 2024, we came in, had to hire people, find a headquarters, and figure out how to make this vision real. The truth is that we deployed assets in places that were easier to build in to get stuff in the ground to go learn from. I didn’t want to go build the first site in LA because it would take a longer time, and second, that’s where you have highest utilization. I wanted to go learn in Kansas first, in Raleigh first, in Minneapolis first. That was very much intentional—I wanted to make sure that within the first nine months of operation as a company, we had the first sites live, which was pretty incredible. Now, we’ve got over 100 sites contracted in California right now. We’ve got over 30 sites that are either in construction or live across California, so from a sequencing standpoint, we are focusing a lot of time, energy, and effort into building scale in California. In NorCal, in PG&E territory, we’ll have over a dozen sites live by the end of this year. In Southern California, I think there’s probably close to half a dozen or more that are in construction right now with Southern California Edison, working hand-in-hand with them to get those energized either this year or into next year. The short answer is, in 2027, you’ll see a markedly different network of Ionna in California than you did prior. One of the sites that we’re opening in Southern California this year is our first flagship or beacon site in Orange County, just off the 405. Again, it’s not just more chargers in the back of a shopping mall; this site off the 405 is going to be 22 high-powered charging bays, a Just Walk Out Amazon partnership convenience store, outdoor seating, and all types of amenities nearby. We’re really trying to elevate that charging experience in addition to getting scale for drivers.
Joel: Now that we’ve established that Minnesota is training wheels to prep yourself for LA, Minnesota has a unique situation where people have cabins and cottages and go on road trips very often to go north on the weekend during the summer, or even in the winter for ice fishing and snowmobiling. As a Minnesota person, I would know where I would stop along I-94 or whatever if I were going up north. Do you guys tap local people when deciding on locations? How do you do that?
Seth: We’ve got what we think to be a fairly sophisticated model in terms of looking at traffic patterns, where people go from a city outward. Typically, people are going inside of a city during the week, and in Minneapolis, you’ve got a lot of people going out to their cabins. We’re constantly looking at what is that outflow of traffic outside of a city, where are they coming, where are they coming back, and then we look at annual average daily traffic on some of these roads to say, “Hey, this road doesn’t have a lot of traffic on it, probably shouldn’t build here, but this one does.” St. Cloud, we have a conversion going on right now with Circle K in St. Cloud, which is like 90 minutes or so northwest of the city. We know people are going to head up I-35 towards Duluth on the weekends, so we try to make sure we hit some of these corridors. We have a whole vacation corridor strategy, whether it’s in Minnesota or here in Raleigh where people go to Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach. We just opened a site near Wilmington, and two sites near Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, because we know that they’re trying to get to a specific vacation spot weekly or monthly.
Joel: On Saturday, my dad and I and some buddies were on our annual Canadian fishing trip, drove all the way up to Baudette and then crossed over into Canada. I was thinking to myself, if I owned a Rivian R1S or a Lucid Gravity, on this route, where would I charge? Which, by the way, is not a typical route; this is definitely an outlier situation. But there aren’t a lot of options on the way there. On the way home, it poured the entire way home—those six hours that we drove. I thought to myself, forget where would I charge for a minute; if I was charging—like the Tesla Supercharger in Bemidji, they’re in a Target parking lot with no canopy—if I had to get out to plug in, it would be awful because it was pouring rain, whereas every gas station we stopped at had a canopy. Not all of your Rechargeries have a canopy. Talk to me a little about the decisions to have canopies versus non-canopies.
Seth: Almost 30% of our sites that are live today have canopies right now. If you look at other networks today, most of them are single digits. We very much had a concerted effort to say we want to put covered charging out into the marketplace because we wanted to make sure that we try to provide the same level of convenience—trash cans, squeegees, canopies where possible—to drivers that drive EVs, because they expect it today on the gasoline side. I’ve still got garbage in the car to throw out; I’ve still got to clean my windshield. It’s also impossible to put canopies everywhere, whether it’s jurisdiction permitting offices that say they don’t want canopies in their jurisdiction, or because it’s going to block a sign of another store. We’ve had canopies where we get out there and dig a hole, and find that the water table is five feet higher than we thought it was, and you just can’t get the casings down for the footers. You go, “Do I kill the site or do I kill the canopy?” I say keep the site for reliable charging, kill the canopy. Where we can, we put in canopies, and where we can’t, we build reliable, affordable, convenient charging.
Kyle: We’ve been talking about the partnerships you guys are moving into with Circle K, Sheetz, Wawa, Casey’s… Because a lot of those are building on existing gas stations, I would imagine it’s more challenging to get a new canopy built just in terms of space availability when the gas station already might have two or three massive ones themselves. But I also feel like that’s probably the fastest route to increasing the number of plugs or bays, rather than trying to build your own Rechargery stations. Do you see these partnerships as the path to scaling here?
Seth: It’s a multi-pronged approach for sure. The Circle K relationship has been tremendous. We’ve taken over the vast majority of their existing US network and replaced those older 180-kilowatt chargers with our equipment. Those already have transformers and interconnects with utilities, so it helps give you a little bit more speed on some of those sites, while some of our more complicated sites take a bit longer to work their way through the funnel. We’ve been heavily focused on high-quality, large-scale retail partners—Circle K, Wawa, Sheetz, Casey’s—to provide drivers with a really great amenity that we can partner with, and then where we can’t or where we want to, we build our own amenities to complement that in the network.
Kyle: I’m curious how the partnership actually works structurally with these chains. Is it a lease agreement where you pay a monthly fee, or do they get a cut of the charging costs? How does it work financially?
Seth: We’re just a tenant in their parking lot. Part of the superpower of Ionna is the fact that we’re founded and funded by eight large automakers, both from a capital standpoint, but also in terms of what the potential is for digital integration into the OEMs. If I’ve got digital integration with the OEMs and digital integration to the retail partners, matching those two up, Ionna could be heavily focused on affordable, reliable, convenient infrastructure, and allow for these retailers and OEMs to work together on providing that next opportunity of experience.
Joel: It’s always bewildered me that no one—forget Ionna, Tesla, Rivian—has hooked up with McDonald’s, because they dominate America everywhere. It’s the ideal thing. Why are you or anyone not in every McDonald’s parking lot?
Seth: Putting charging stations in requires space and parking spots. Even with some of our Circle K or Wawa sites, there’s sites we’ve had to turn down because we’ve tried every which way to fit in eight stalls or 10 stalls and there’s setbacks or rules on how far from the road you have to be. Every store you build has minimum parking requirements from the town. The smaller the footprint of that retail provider or QSR (quick-service restaurant), the harder it is to actually deploy chargers. A lot of places we’d love to go, at the end of the day, it just becomes geometry.
Joel: That makes a lot of sense, because a lot of these McDonald’s don’t have large parking lots. But a lot of these charging networks are in Menards parking lots, Target parking lots, or Walmart parking lots, because these are big parking lots with plenty of space to put them in the back. That makes a lot of sense; thank you for shedding that light.
Seth: Yeah, for sure.
Kyle: On the topic of the chargers themselves, you guys use Alpitronic hardware, is that correct?
Seth: That’s correct.
Kyle: And the software is all done in-house, right?
Seth: We have a lot of different partners, so we do have other providers of software pieces that go along. We’ve got a charging station provider, credit card terminals… every one of these things has software that ties to them. What we’ve built in-house is providing an overall software platform layer that sits across all the different systems that we have. As these sites get more complicated, I’ve got electronic door locks, cameras, credit card terminals, internet providers. We’ve built all types of software controls, monitoring, diagnostics, and alerting that sits across everything that we deploy in our ecosystem.
Kyle: A two-part question on that: One, what have you guys done differently to avoid the reliability pitfalls that have bedeviled the whole industry? Half the plugs at a given station near me are always down, which is frustrating. More uptime would help everyone feel more comfortable with charging as a public utility. And two, I think it’s great that you guys don’t have an app. What did you have to do to make the whole business function without a dedicated app for payments and locating chargers?
Seth: On the reliability piece, it comes down to culturally how we built the business. What we’ve told our team and live by every day is the driver is the first and foremost center of our world when we make a decision. There’s a lot of times where a customer might say the charger didn’t work for me on the first try. Now you have a decision to make: do you ignore it because the next person charged okay, do you roll a truck, or do you wait to see if it worked for somebody else? Because we put the driver first culturally, that drives different behaviors where you say, “Nope, roll a truck.” We do what we call a health check and validate and verify what we heard from that driver. Most times it comes back as working fine, but other times we might find an issue and swap out a cable while on site. That permeates through the entire organization. When you have a decision to make, you look and say, “I’m going to do it with the driver in mind,” and that drives certain behaviors. That is part of our secret sauce. In addition to that, we’ve built a lot of tools, diagnostics, and now with AI, there’s a lot more you can do in terms of inferring what might be going on. We take an approach of when we think there’s something wrong, we take a “field medic” approach: go to the site with 10 parts, bring a Pelican case with every part to rebuild the charger, swap out all 10 parts, bring back all 10 parts, figure out what actually was broken, and then get smarter so the next field visit we only bring eight parts. That’s a different approach because we’re thinking about the driver and resolution time first and foremost.
Kyle: Before we get to the app question, what is the thing that breaks the most on a charger? What is the number one replaced item?
Seth: Physically, it’s the charging cable. It gets dropped, there’s interference, wear and tear, and then that causes an issue in the performance. Also, we’re finding we have to reset chargers more often than I’d probably like to, especially the credit card readers. But now we’ve built automation where when we see a certain behavior, those credit card readers automatically reset in the middle of the night, whereas before we just staffed up and reset all the readers as often as possible. Now we’ve built software tools to do that for us.
Kyle: You guys just need that little button you can only press with a toothpick, like on electronics: “Reset,” so the consumer can do it.
Seth: Exactly.
Joel: As we transition, America has decided on NACS—for those listening, NACS is the Tesla-style charger versus CCS, the clunky one we started with. Is CCS more or less reliable than NACS?
Seth: We haven’t seen any difference in performance between the two with our customers. By and large, our utilization right now is on CCS, but it’s interesting that we’re starting to see a lot more utilization and quicker growth on the NACS side, which lends itself to seeing more Tesla drivers charging with us than before. And keep in mind, a lot of vehicles being sold now are native NACS.
Joel: Just for context, the Ioniqs from Hyundai announced switching to NACS, Rivian switched for 2026 model year, Subarus and Toyotas switched, GM is switching… Teslas obviously outnumber everything on the road, but the automakers themselves, their newer cars have NACS.
Seth: Yeah.
Kyle: Speaking of automakers, Ionna is unique in that it’s a joint venture founded by seven, now eight, automakers. What’s it like having eight different bosses?
Seth: It’s a very unique company and opportunity. It really is a partnership between us and the eight OEMs. We have a Board of Directors from the OEMs on the investor side, so we have a lot of engagement with them in terms of oversight and governance. Our results are a testament to the relationship we’ve built to go build this company, because early on people asked how Ionna could be successful with eight car companies building it. There’s not eight car companies building it; there’s an Ionna team building the company with oversight from the investors in terms of specific results they’re looking for: quality at scale within the capital framework. As long as we operate within that framework, things work really well and we can make decisions day-to-day to drive results. But the next part of it is strategic: how do we integrate into the OEMs and automakers? These automakers are giving discounts to their drivers that charge at Ionna. We’re heavily focused on Plug & Charge and AutoCharge across all the automakers, and integrating into their apps. We don’t have an app partly because we don’t want to be in the way of the automakers and their customers. We want to provide reliable, affordable, convenient charging so that automakers can go sell more cars.
Kyle: So it’s not a case where GM is like, “Hey, we’ve got a high concentration of GM owners in this city, you should build more chargers there,” and Mercedes is like, “No, put it over here!” It’s not an activist investor presence?
Seth: No, it wouldn’t work. It would never work; that’s the key thing.
Joel: The elephant in the room is Ionna is owned by eight automakers, and they’re building the cars, selling the cars, and now selling you the fuel. Should this matter to anybody, or not really?
Seth: I think it should matter to people in a positive way—that you can take eight car companies as staunch competitors and they can come together to found and fund this type of entity for it to be successful. Sometimes what it takes is partnerships to drive innovation and forward momentum in any industry. When I saw the announcement in 2023, I thought this could be really interesting to finally solve charging, and that’s why I wanted to come work with the automakers and Ionna to build this company from literally zero and realize a vision they all had. There are days where I reflect back and think, I can’t believe we’re actually sort of accomplishing what was in that press release from 2023. It was a daunting task, and the level of support and engagement from the carmakers has been unprecedented.
Kyle: How does it work with the automakers’ own charging efforts and partnerships? GM has their own branded chargers with EVgo at Pilot stores, Mercedes has been launching their own branded chargers, yet they’re also investors in Ionna. How does that work when they’re kind of competing with each other as we’re all trying to build out this nationwide network?
Seth: There’s a big need for charging infrastructure in the country, as you guys know. There are EVs on the road today that still don’t have the charging they need, and there’s still cars being sold today, next year, and the year after, so we’ve got a gap. There are legacy programs that were set up that are still running their course. They’re separate entities; there’s no relationship to Ionna or interaction between us and those entities. It just allows for larger penetration of EV charging into the industry. But Ionna is special in that you’ve got this strategic joint venture that exists with eight car companies part of the effort.
Joel: How fast do we need to go? How fast do our chargers and how quickly do they need to be able to recharge go? News broke this morning out of China about how they have quote “five-minute charging that’ll take you to 70%,” leaving the rest of the world behind. But we are already getting fast. I had a Volvo EX90 in June, drove it to the lake, plugged into a 350 charger at an EA stop at Menards in Alexandria. At 44%, it took me 18 minutes—it instantly went to over 300 kilowatts, like 315, sustained it, and took me from 44% to over 90% in 18 minutes. How fast do we need to be, or is China just showing off?
Seth: Nobody stops to fuel their vehicle taking gasoline, gets out, rushes as fast as possible, puts as much fuel in the car as possible, and gets back in the car and drives away. Some of these gas stations today are more like a restaurant than a gas station. Look at Wawa, Sheetz, Casey’s, Buc-ee’s, Wally’s—these are places people are spending time inside the store. A lot of these places actually make a lot of their money inside the store because that’s where people spend their time. This idea that charging has to be done in five minutes or people won’t buy EVs is just not accurate. The proof is in the pudding in that 6% of all cars sold in July were still EVs with the existing current infrastructure set and technology set on the cars. You’re looking at how do you get to a place of 10 to 20 minutes from the charging speed, which gives you enough time to use a bathroom, get a sandwich, stretch your legs, take the dog for a walk, versus “I’m going to jump out of the car and make believe it’s Supermarket Sweepstakes and see how fast I can fuel up and drive away.” I just don’t think that’s what people are doing.
Joel: As a dad with a wife and two kids, two years ago we went down to Iowa for Christmas in the cold and snow. I timed it from the time I put it in park to the time I put it in drive: we parked, everyone went inside to the bathroom, grabbed McDonald’s, filled the car with gas. I timed it: it took 31 minutes. Four people, it takes a minute. If I had a Rivian, a Lucid, or an Ioniq 9, that would have been plenty of time on that Supercharger. That’s just the reality.
Seth: 100%, exactly. Everything we deploy now is 400 kilowatts; we’re looking at 500 kilowatts in our next generation of sites. Much above that, I don’t think you need it. I just don’t.
Kyle: I’m with you on the principle there, but I do wonder how you guys view the mindset that if you own an EV, a DC fast charger should be able to serve as your main charging source, whereas a lot of automakers will tell you that you should be charging at home every night, so DC fast chargers are only for road trips. A 30-minute stop might make sense when you’re on a road trip with family, but if you’re swinging by your local charging station for your weekly commute, you don’t want to be there for 30 minutes necessarily. Are you trying to focus on those kinds of drivers at all, or is it really the ideal use case for DC fast charging?
Seth: 70% of our investment is going to happen inside of cities. We’re building in Orlando, in Tampa, in Jacksonville. What we’ve built on the interstate system of Florida is minimal. It’s not necessarily easy to put chargers in your house. You’ve got older homes; it could be cost-prohibitive. So there’s definitely an advantage of charging at home, for sure. But we want to make sure that as you get into high-rise buildings, condos, or older homes that can’t support home charging, or if you do a lot of driving in a weekend, we want to make sure we’ve got charging in place in these cities to support these drivers.
Kyle: The real dream is if we could all have DC fast chargers at home.
Seth: At home, I’m sure the utility would love that.
Kyle: I’ve asked Southern California Edison about that; they are not on board, unfortunately.
Joel: Tesla’s really done a good job about targets if you ask me, but no one’s really doing a great job at grocery stores. I don’t know why, at least here in Minnesota…
Seth: Have you been to our Hy-Vee site? We’ve got a couple Hy-Vees up in Minnesota. We’ll send you a list afterwards.
Joel: I have a home charger. We put a charger up at the lake, put a charger here. But fast charging to go see family or go on a road trip is important. And 30% of people live in non-single-family homes in America—a big market.
Kyle: And I’m the guy with an EV who doesn’t have charging at home, hence my question.
Seth: It’s a challenge.
Kyle: It is a challenge. I live in an old house, don’t have a garage, it’s expensive to install one, and I’m on a two-year lease.
Seth: Our first house was in Connecticut built in the ’30s. I charged Level 1 all the time because it was impossible to get a Level 2 charger from my basement to the detached garage in the back of my yard, so I just plugged into an extension cord every night.
Joel: Hope that was safe!
Seth: It was definitely properly rated and properly installed.
Kyle: Well on that note, Seth Cutler, thank you so much for your time, really appreciate it.
Seth: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it too, great conversation.
Joel: We’ll absolutely have you back, thank you.
Seth: Love it, thanks guys.
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
