IONNA's Eight-Automaker Bet on the Modern Gas Station
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- IONNA, a joint venture owned by eight automakers (BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Toyota), builds public DC fast chargers paired with amenities like canopies, restrooms, food, and lounges — pitched as a modern take on the gas station
- Seth Cutler, IONNA's CEO and former chief engineer at Electrify America, frames public charging in four phases: getting chargers in the ground, network build-out (led by Tesla), reliability and uptime post-COVID, and now the experience layer beyond reliability
- Electrify America introduced high-powered charging, liquid-cooled cables, and 800-volt architecture early on, but the network became notorious for unreliable chargers — a problem IONNA explicitly aims to fix
- Tesla Supercharger Network was first to market in network build-out, and Cutler identifies it as the competitive benchmark IONNA must beat as the industry enters what he calls 'phase four'
- IONNA runs customer clinics at its deployed sites, gathering nearly 1,000 responses from a June round alone, and partners with Amazon at certain locations to deliver the experience layer that goes beyond a working plug
Why it matters: For eight automakers to pool capital into a single charging network is structurally unusual — and the bet is that EV charging needs a gas-station experience, not just more working plugs. If IONNA's model works, it sets a new reliability baseline that competing networks (including Tesla's) have to match; if it doesn't, the OEMs will have spent on another charging 1.0-style failure.
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