Can public EV chargers be as reliable as gas stations?

0:06All righty. Hello, everybody. Greetings. This is Volts for August 14th, 2026. Can public EV chargers be as reliable as gas stations? I'm your host, David Roberts. Charging an electric vehicle at home is incredibly easy and convenient. Charging an EV almost anywhere else is less so. If you live in a multifamily building, if you're in a rental car, if you're on a longer trip away from home, you're in a bit of a crapshoot. More public chargers actually work these days than in the dark days of five years ago. But there are still plenty of duds, and even success remains a somewhat grim and dutiful affair.

0:59Chargers are often plopped on the edge of huge parking lots, exposed to weather. Best case, there's some kind of strip mall across that parking lot. If you fuel up a gasoline car, you can, at a minimum, expect to find a working pump that is sheltered from the elements and attended by a place to kill a few minutes and get a snack or go to the bathroom. Could EV charging stations be the same? That is the bet IANA is making. IANA is a joint venture owned by eight major automakers. BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota that builds and operates public DC fast chargers.

1:49The idea is to pair high-powered, reliable, accessible chargers with amenities like canopies, restrooms, food, and lounges. At least in aspiration, it's a modern version of the gas station. Today, I'm going to talk with CEO Seth Cutler about the economics of charging EVs during a market slowdown in a shaky economy and what it might mean to actually enjoy charging an EV in public. All right, then. With no further ado, Seth Cutler, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to talking with you. All right. So before we get to what you're calling public charging 2.0, let's talk briefly about public charging 1.0.

2:40You were the chief engineer for Electrify America, which was Volkswagen's sort of big bid to build a nationwide network of EV chargers. This was in 2018, 2019. Not to blame you for all this, but I think it's safe to say when a lot of EV owners think about their negative experiences at public DC chargers, Electrify America is kind of towards the top of that list. A lot of those just ended up not working or working inconsistently or being a pain in the butt. So maybe just tell us to begin with, what went wrong with public charging 1.0? What are the problems we're trying to fix here? Yeah, I look at public charging as actually four phases.

3:29And so I've been in the industry going on quite some time, started my career with General Electric, ran GE's charging business back in 2012 to 2017. we were focused on home charging and public L2 charging at the time. To your point, I was with Electrify America, I was with EV Connect, and now with IANA. And if you look at where charging infrastructure started, you know, back in the launch of the Nissan Leaf, there was a need to put out, you know, public DC fast charging back in 2010 even to support a vehicle that could only go 70 to 80 miles on a single charge. And so at that time, it was about how do you just put charges in the ground, irrespective where they might go, put a single node in a single parking lot, irrespective of the amenity or whatever might be adjacent to it.

4:16So that was what I would define as phase one was really the advent of public fast charging and just getting them in the ground. Phase two was really around, to your point, the build out of networks. And I think Tesla obviously was first to market to go do that. EVgo was heavily focused at the time inside of cities, but really wasn't looking at connecting the cities. Electrify America, which I was a part of early on, was really looking to be the answer to Tesla at the time back in the 2017 timeline. And obviously, Electrify America brought high-powered charging, even higher-powered charging than Tesla had done at the time, liquid-cooled cables, 800-volt architecture, so early technology into the market, which was then followed by what I refer to as phase three.

4:56Phase three was really around reliably in uptime. I mean, you look at you know, kind of the post-COVID world, people driving again, electric EV adoption rates picking up. All of a sudden, I had all this infrastructure out there that had been proliferated over, you know, almost 10 years at that point. And people found that at high utilizations, you had a lot of queuing. A lot of queuing meant that the reliability and uptime that may have been acceptable in 2017, 2018 was no longer acceptable when people needed to charge and a six-base site became a two-base site at that time. And folks, you know, either didn't have the supply chain to support it or had never built out the operational processes in terms of being able to support that level of uptime to meet the needs of drivers.

5:36And I think by and far, I'd say the industry has come a long way in 2026, 2025 and where it was in 2020 and 2022. And that brings us to kind of this current phase. I look at as phase four of the market, and this is really where Iana is playing, which is how do you think about the experience beyond just reliability? And the analogy I always give is, you know, folks typically don't look to see which restaurants will cause food poisoning. They, it's kind of taken as a, uh, kind of like the table stakes of like, if I go here, I'm not going to get sick or they're looking for at that point to judge where they eat is what's on the menu.

6:09What's the price, what's the ambience, what's the experience I'm going to have at that restaurant. And that's really what we're trying to do is say, listen, the chargers have to work every time, all the time on the first try. That's what we're focused on. But we want to make sure that the experience that they have beyond that is bar none a really great experience canopies trash cans squeegees access to bathrooms access to amenities unique experiences you know we partner with amazon in certain locations so that's how i look at the last honestly 16 years of charging in the united states and where we are and where iana is trying to play i'm sort of curious has anyone has you iana or anyone done any kind of sort of systematic polling or surveying of EV owners and ask them what they most want or expect out of these things?

6:58Like, I mean, obviously reliability, I think, but I wonder like, what else do people want or are they asking for? Are they complaining about? Do we know with any certainty? Yeah, we've done a lot of market research and market studies early on and we continue to poll our customers. You know, in fact, we just finished June with, I think, five or six, what we call customer clinics, where we went out and interacted with drivers at our sites. Because one thing to interview drivers before you've deployed assets and talk to them about what would be interesting, it's another thing to do it in a parking lot with your equipment on site.

7:30And so we've gotten, just from that activity alone, I think nearly a thousand responses from direct interaction with our employees and drivers. But look, I think there's a lot of common themes, right? So beyond reliability, it's got to be affordable. They're looking for safety, good lighting at night. They're looking for canopy coverage where possible. They're looking for what we refer to as car care, trash cans, squeegees, other things. And they're looking for amenities. And so, you know, that's where we've been really focused is how do we make sure we can deliver all those things where possible?

8:01Can't always provide a canopy at every site for lots of different reasons. But right now, 30 % of our sites roughly have canopies on them, the ones that are deployed and there's more coming, right? We try to have this dual loop of deploy, learn, test, deploy, learn, test over and over again with our drivers. Well, talk about just Ayana a little bit then. Sort of like, how did it come about? I guess, like whose idea was it? What's the idea behind it? And then what's kind of the vision? What's the big idea? Yeah, so the OEM founded the company. I think there were talks back in 2015, 2016 about developing a joint venture in the U.S.

8:39Obviously, Volkswagen launched Electrify America as part of their needs in the market with things that were happening regulatorily. which I think at that time basically took away the need to have a joint venture launch in North America, particularly the United States. But you did see a joint venture launch in Europe, which is known as IANA-T at the time. Back in, I think, 2021, 2022, I think the OEMs recognized that charging was still not fixed in the US. And with, I think, forward-looking perspective that electrification and e-mobility was a real thing that was going to happen at scale. Well, the biggest issue today or even back then was infrastructure, reliability, charging anxiety, not range anxiety necessarily, but charging anxiety.

9:18Will the charger work when I get there? And so the OEMs took it upon themselves. They said, listen, we need to go do what we did in Europe, but do it here in the US. In July of 2023, they publicly announced the formation of IANA. I started in as employee number one in February of 2024 to take the vision and build a team and take that team and make a reality out of that vision, right? And so what the vision was, was how do we remove the obstacle of charging being the reason why we can't seem to move electrification forward from a transportation perspective? And we've taken that, the team has taken that into their own in terms of the type of experiences that we put out there, the types of sites that we deploy and where we deploy these sites.

9:55Well, what's the, sort of concretely, I know you have this 30 ,000 goal, but as I've been reading around, it's hard to get a beat on 30 ,000 what exactly, because there are, there's chargers, there's stalls, there's sites, there's, you know, there's different ways of counting this. What is, what is your short-term goal by 2030, say? Yeah. So we talk about 30 ,000 charging bays. I think the industry sometimes call them stalls. We call them bays. That's like a parking spot, basically. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Yep, exactly. So like every one of our chargers we deploy today can charge two cars at a time.

10:30And so one charger serves two charging bays. And each site is made up of anywhere from, you know, on average, roughly 10 bays. That's how a site breaks out. Every chargery for us is 10 bays on average. You'll see some smaller, you'll see some bigger, but that's the average. And where are you at? Like what's been built? Yeah, that's a good question. So we just turned on site number 143 last Friday. We'll be approaching site 150 by next Friday. And so that's roughly just over 1 ,300 bays that are live to the public right now across just over 30 states. And so for us, going back, the company started February 24.

11:14One employee, we built it from there. Today, we're just under 100 people based in Durham, Raleigh, North Carolina, or Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina. And so really, 2024 was setting up the company. We built this business essentially from zero, right? There was no, we're not part of a bigger company. We're not part of a division. Everything is separate from the OEMs. They're equal stake owners inside of IANA. And so 2024 was go build a company, build an organization, and launch the first sites, what I call the prototype sites. And so you saw a mix of sites that we built in different locations, some that were full scale rechargeries with 24-7 access to bathrooms where we built the amenity.

11:49Others where we built them as sheets. Most of them so far are attached to, are not the full rechargeries, right? I mean, just by number, most of them so far are not the full gas station vision yet. They're attached to something else. Is that right? Yeah. So we, you know, from a product, what we call a product archetype perspective, the majority of what we will build will be attached to an amenity. Over 70 % will be attached to what we call a rechargery. And we have two types of rechargeries. One is called a rechargery at, those are partners with marquee partners, such as a Wawa, a Sheets, a Wally's, a Hy-Vee, et cetera.

12:25And then the other part of the rechargeries are ones where we're building the amenity from the ground up. Now we've got, I think half a dozen of those launched right now. And we have dozens more, dozens more that are working their way through permitting. Those obviously take longer because you can imagine permitting, et cetera, is a different process when you have to go through zoning to build a building or to operate a building. So when one is attached, say, to a Wawa, we're just talking about it would look like a bay, like one of the pumps, you know, like a gas station pump. It would just be a version of that attached to a Wawa, you know, convenience store.

13:07Is that kind of the idea there? That is. And, you know, we just launched our first Wawa with a canopy in Indiana. We've launched a canopy with sheets. We've done the same thing at Wally. So what we're trying to do, to your point, is provide a fueling experience at a location where you can get amenities that make sense for a fueling environment. And so that's why a lot of what we've built are co-located with those types of marquee partners. Mm-hmm. And that's going to be, and the idea is the majority is going to be a bay sort of attached to someone else's convenience store. And then you say 30 %-ish are going to be your own freestanding rechargeries.

13:46Yeah. So in the 70 % of the rechargeries, there's two types of rechargeries, rechargery ats, and then rechargeries, full rechargeries where we're building the amenity. The 30 % left over will be ones that potentially will be adjacent to a larger shopping complex or other types of amenities that might be nearby. I see. I see. But just to be clear about this, you've built 1 ,300 or so, so far. Your target is 30 ,000 by 2030. So you're going to have to ramp up the pace. Like the pace is going to have to be ramped up substantially to get to that target, right? Yeah, you're doing the math, right? Again, for us, it's about coverage.

14:29And so we talked about 30 ,000 bays. We'll figure out exactly how many sites that is and what that works out into. But right now we have just under 600 sites that are contracted across the United States today, of which 200 are in construction or live to customers, which means there's another 400 sites right now that are essentially in permitting, working their way through. And then we're growing that pipeline as well. So, you know, in the two and a half years that we've been a company, a year and a half that we've been operational as a business in terms of sites life to the public, we've grown from, you know, zero essentially to, you know, just under 600 sites contracted that are working their way to becoming operational.

15:06And give me some sense of the proportion. I mean, insofar as you know yet, how many of those are going to be located on like a convenience store that's off the highway for long distance travelers versus something in a city or something in a suburb? Like, do we know roughly the distribution where they're going to be? yeah we know i know a lot because because we've got so many contracted you know what i can tell you is going back to the 70 percent uh i think we like the number 70 so 70 percent of our investment are inside of cities 30 inside cities inside cities interesting now what i'll tell you is what we what we've tried to do tried to do inside of cities is to build the sites next interstate even if they're in a city so you know one of our one of our most popular from a utilization perspective sites is in Houston, Texas.

16:05It's probably, you know, 10 minutes out of downtown. It's about a quarter mile, I think, off of I-10. That's a rechargery, full-scale rechargery that we've built in Houston to serve the Houston market. But it also serves folks that are driving through the Houston market to the next town over. Got it. Interesting. So, you know, most of people, I think when they hear about this fast-retarding, DC fast-retarding, they kind of think about road trips. They think about interstates. They think about long distance, but mostly in cities. Like who's using in-city, you know, like what is the customer for the in-city charger?

16:45Is it just people who live in apartments, don't have their own home charging? Is it people who are passing through the cities? Do you have a sense of your sort of average customer to one of these things? Yeah. So there's four customer groups that we look at. You know, obviously to your point, We'll start with the one that probably makes the most sense or the most obvious to folks, I would say, is, you know, folks that are doing, you know, long distance travel for vacations. For sure, that is a need. And, you know, right now, again, even in our early days, we already have national coverage across all of I-70, you know, all the way from California to Raleigh.

17:18Folks have already done that trip coast to coast. We've got coverage all the way up from, you know, New York City, essentially, down to Florida on I-95. And then I-5 is being built out right now. We've got pretty good density all the way from Seattle all the way down towards LA and filling in. So we've got coverage on all these interstates. That's your first customer group. Second customer group are going to be your daily commuters. And these are folks, to your point, that are going to charge mainly at home. But there are times, and I'm in that situation, where you drove more than you thought you would.

17:49You didn't charge at home. You're going to need a public charger. And it happens to the best of us when we try to charge at home. The second group are going to be your daily commuters that are folks that live in an apartment building or an older home. You know, I had a home, I remember back in New England, that there was no way I'd be able to put an L2 charger there. So I had to survive off L1. And honestly, it's going to be difficult to survive off of L1 or no charging at home. And so that's where you're looking for some sort of hub, charging hub inside of a city to serve your needs. And then the last group is really fleet.

18:24And fleet breaks out into Uber drivers and rideshare drivers, but also in terms of fleet with a business, whether it's some sort of service business, et cetera. So we look at all four of those groups and then figure out how to build sites where we call stack use cases for all those customers to use the same location. So let's talk a little bit about the economics just of the charging part itself. So I saw this study that says that a DC fast charging port generally needs about 15 to 25 % utilization just to cover its costs. And once you fall below that, you get 10 to 15 or below, they're losing money.

19:10And industry-wide utilization is hovering right around 15%. So barely, basically, like, does not look like a good business, basically, in terms of charging, especially with typical utility rates where they charge these demand charges, which we'll get back to in a second. You know, the more power you're running through it, the higher your demand charges and the worse the economics. So you are both using the highest powered chargers out there, 400 kilowatts, and also charging a flat 39 cents per kilowatt hour, which is, I think, lower than the industry average. So how do you expect to make money on the electrons themselves?

19:56Yeah, so one I would tell you is we're building out a network, right? So there's going to be some sites that outperform other sites and some sites that underperform other sites. But at the end of the day, it's a full network we're building to provide customers with, honestly, the network that they can rely on for their everyday travel and vacation travel. And cognizant of the fact that it'll all work out from a network effect perspective. Secondarily, what I would tell you is I think you got to take a little bit of a longer view on where the market's at. you know today there's a charging gap but we know vehicle sales are not going to go to zero so we know more cars will get sold this year next year the year after we know that the the types of cars coming to market are vastly superior to the cars that have been on the market longer ranges faster charging that's going to lend itself to higher adoption rates so you know if this was a baseball game we're probably still in the second inning honestly in terms of where the market's going to be and adoption is going to be and as more cars are sold there's more demand as more demand gets there, obviously that bodes well for the charging world.

21:00And then lastly, I think to your point about what the averages are, there's probably some sites that in general, competitors and folks in the industry that outperform and or underperform other locations. Because again, in this next phase of infrastructure build out, customers have choice and with choice, they're looking for what is a great experience and what's affordable. And that's really what Ayana is focused on is to make sure that we're there for we're meeting customers on the road to where they're trying to go um so that's how we view it so let's talk about the demand charges then so just for listeners who aren't familiar with this it's sort of like this is where the utility charges you not a flat fee for every kilowatt hour but specific charges based on your highest use and so dc chargers run into these demand charges wherever they go because you get these sort of like fast, intense draws of power.

21:56I wonder how you're thinking about that. I mean, what the obvious question here is, the obvious way to avoid this is to have a little solar and battery on site so you can, you know, spread out your usage, spread out your draw from the utility to avoid those spikes. are you thinking about that? And otherwise, how are you trying to get around these demand charges? Yeah, I'll start with, you know, we, when we started the company early on, and part of what's allowed us to scale so fast has been extreme focus, like this urgency and focus on getting the quality right and getting sites built fast. So we had opportunities to put batteries in place early on, and we made conscious decisions not to go do that because it's very easy to get distracted and lose out on what the mission was and the mission continues to be, which is put the driver first and deliver the best experience to that driver from a charging perspective.

22:51So putting batteries in doesn't help the driver. It does help Ayana, potentially, if you can make the financials a pencil, but it doesn't help the drivers. And that's where a lot of companies get lost, I think, in terms of what they're working on. I think as we get into future years, as the network gets built, as we feel that we're in a good spot and we think we can add benefit to drivers on the economics will look to put batteries in or do other things from a demand mitigation standpoint, demand charge mitigation standpoint. But for right now, it's not a focus of what we're trying to do. And what I would tell you also, though, is a lot of the economics tie back to how well and efficient the companies run.

23:27Because if you have a lot of G &A costs or general and administrative costs in terms of marketing expenses and development expenses and what it costs around the business, you obviously need to charge more at the charging bay to cover those those base costs and we have been hyper focused on how do we remain efficient and agile um to ensure that we can you know run the business efficiently while achieving our goals for our customers and being an affordable option to drivers on the road how difficult is just getting the power i guess maybe if you're attaching to an existing site like a wawa or whatever i don't know why I keep coming back to Wawa, I just like saying Wawa.

24:11Presumably they have an interconnection agreement and power available, but a new site, like how, how big of a barrier is interconnection and like you kind of utility holdups and just getting, getting a hold of the level of power you need, which is, you know, a lot of power, especially get to higher utilizations. You know, it's a lot of electricity. How big of a challenge is that? Yeah. So actually irrespective of Wawa or whether we build our own site or we build it on a corridor without a gas station nearby, we always get our own meter and transformer from the utility. So it's the same problem irrespective of where we build.

24:46But yeah, I mean, the biggest problem for infrastructure is getting permits and getting power. The actual cycle time to build a site, honestly, is very fast. You know, we can build a site. We built, we have one site, this is internal to Ayana's, legendary Tucumcari, New Mexico. We built the site in six days and energized on the 7th, which I guess sounds funny as I say it, but that's literally what happened. I'm guessing it takes longer than six days to get a permit for anything, to do anything anywhere. Exactly. And so that is the biggest challenge in infrastructure is how fast can you get a permit, how fast can you get power.

25:18I think some parts of the country are faster than others. Some parts of the country are slower than others. And so that's what we've been working through, but that's also why we've been growing our site pipeline and site funnel so fast because it allows the ones that move faster to kind of be your short cycle sites that you can build a network out. We got our Kansas sites on first. It allows the longer lead sites that might take into the year timelines to measure time to fill in and be your long cycle sites as we build out the network overall. Yeah, you mentioned how you need to work with utilities and you view utilities as partners.

25:52And I know you probably have to say that you have to be nice to utilities, but they are. They're the ones that make the money on these demand charges, you know, and they make more money, the more the higher the demand charges they charge you. And there are also some utilities that run their own competing charging networks. like in Florida, I guess I just wonder like how, how much of an alignment is there between your interests and the utilities interests? What is that relationship like? I mean, utilities are in the business of selling electricity to businesses. We're in the business of selling electricity to consumers and buying electricity from utilities.

26:31So it is a very much a symbiotic relationship between IANA and the utilities. You know, I think, I think like every large organization there's processes that they followed and so we've done a lot of work to as i've said in other podcasts other interviews to partner with them to say okay what is the process and how do we help in that way right and so there are some utilities where you know we we do some of the utility construction uh portion um we've worked the utilities in terms of um you know we worked pgne is a great example that we work with them on their flux connect program of how do we make sure that we can you know mitigate demand during during certain peak hours and peak days of the year yeah There's other utilities where we've undersized transformers and do whole site energy management to be able to meet whatever the requirements are for upstream power.

27:21So IANA is born out of partnerships. We have eight OEMs we work for that are staunch competitors but have to work together to drive the business forward. We try to treat it the same way with working with utilities to make sure we're partnered with them to get these sites turned on as fast as possible. yeah yeah i wonder like to the extent you can tell us like do utilities do you find generally that utilities want one of these things like you know i always find utilities incentives and desires somewhat mysterious like have you found that they welcome and want one of these things and are trying to work with you or is this like oh no a burden a big spiky unpredictable respectable consumer you know it's this is a drag let's make them jump through a bunch of hoops like what are the utility incentives here to the extent you can't explain them yeah i i i have personally and i've talked to quite a few utilities not just in the last two and a half years being at ayana but but you know in the course of my career yeah i've never met a utility that said we've we hate evs we hate electrification we don't want your charging cubs that that doesn't happen at least It's not in my experience.

28:34What does happen is they might say, hey, listen, you're trying to put a charger on this city block and the feeder feeding this charging or the block you want to go do doesn't have the existing power. So you can't build it here. Like you can build it here, but it's probably gonna take three to five years. And we've walked away from sites because of that. We've also kept sites. I've got a site right now in California where we bought the land, found that after the fact that there's not enough power and we'll build it in 2028. And that's okay, right? That's okay because we're taking a long-term view of how we're building up the network and we need sites in 2028.

29:07It's not just what we need now. So again, this goes back to like, how do you make sure that you're working with utilities early on in terms of these are sites we're evaluating? Where does it fit with where you've got capacity needs? Right. This idea of these freestanding sites, I'm sort of vaguely fascinated by this. Like, is there a template like that you'll be following? Like, will they look the same wherever I encounter them? Are they going to be like customized to different sites? And also a second question about those is one of the sort of notorious things about gas stations is they don't make a lot of money on gas.

29:45They make most of their money on selling you snacks and whatnot in the gas stations, in the, you know, in the stores. Are you going to do you view the sort of sales of amenities and stuff that are attached to your chargers as a serious revenue generator or are they mostly just to lure people to the power and you make money on the power? Like what's the sort of revenue balance of selling stuff alongside them? Hey there, everybody. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts. It is supported entirely by listeners like you.

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31:52But I'll answer it this way. And I think this is where some of the conversation gets more interesting in terms of what we're doing and where we're experimenting. You know, I think a lot of companies forget why they're there, right? And I think as I tell, as we talk internally at IANA and we tell the team, like, this is a very simple business. We're in the business of selling electrons. That's what the business is. It doesn't mean that there might not be other ways to monetize what I call the platform or the network later on. But if we try to get fancy and get cute and think of all the ways we could monetize right now, we forget that there's a driver, a mom, a dad, a grandparent, someone's kid who's trying to charge a car, who's looking for a reliable, safe, affordable charging experience.

32:32And so we need to be hyper-focused on that. Yes, but while they're charging, they're sitting around for 20 minutes. That's, you know, like, that's a, no way you're not going to view that as some kind of revenue opportunity, these people sitting around for 20 minutes. I mean, a gas station, you're sitting around for like five minutes, but Max, you know, you have people sitting around for longer than a gas station. They want something to do. What do you, you know, what are you going to give them? Well, so we give them stuff today, right? We give them stuff today with our partners, with Wawa, with Sheetz, with Casey, et cetera, or they come to one of our sites where we built out an amenity.

33:06Apex, North Carolina, Houston, Texas. Yeah, like what does that look like? What is it? Give us a visual. Yeah, it's fair. So for those sites, let me ask you your first question before, which was, are they going to all look the same? And the answer is no. And that's kind of something that's really unique about how we built this out. And I can tell you why we go deeper there. And in terms of what we provide them, you know, typically it's driver lounge, 24-7 access, couches, chairs, seating, bathrooms, vending, or really what I would call full C-store with Amazon Just Walk Out technology where they can go buy snacks, drinks, etc.

33:43And so each of those full-scale rechargeries, and I think we've got just about six of them open right now with dozens more coming, that's what it provides is basically an IANA-based experience, 24-7, safe access, clean access to these facilities. Do you require, I wonder how much human, you know, the charging, the chargers themselves do not require human attendance. But what about the amenities? What about selling the food? What about, you know, security? Like, are there human employees at these things? There are not human employees based here 24-7. We have a lot of security built in in terms of how you can access them.

34:32So you have to scan a QR code. We have other restrictions that we put in place. We've got security cameras built in. Scan a code to get in the lounge thing. Yeah, correct. The QR code. They scan a QR code. And in some cases, you have to actually be in a charge session before you can scan the QR code so that we're restricting access to those folks who are charging. um you know in in some depending on in some cases you know we might we might contract with local security that might that might you know come by every so often and even even for sites you know honestly even for sites where uh we don't have the amenity you know we put in um in certain cases 24 7 cameras and and lighting again to provide safety and and provide uh to provide you know a field of vision at these locations so we're constantly looking at beyond just the charging what needs to take place and but but david just go back to your other question before about providing someone an experience and how you monetize it to different things and that was where i was driving before which is we're hyper focused on experience so that's why we provide all these amenities but it's not like i have teams of people running around trying to figure how to monetize drivers and how to make money off of them when they get there what i'm trying to make sure is when they get there it's clean and it works and are the final question about the sort of like amenities Are these customized at all regionally or based on whether it's in a city or on a highway somewhere?

35:56I guess how much work is going into sort of customizing the experience on a location-based way? Yeah, I think that's actually the fun part. So early on, we said, listen, we know we want to do things differently. We want to buy land. We want to build our own amenities. and in some cases we went and bought a greenfield piece of land it was a you know a piece of dirt or grass right and we and we built in our houston our houston rechargery is just that where we we built from the ground up an amenity and we customize it for that location what could we fit there want to build no less than eight charging bays what could we fit but what could we could fit was two bathrooms outsourced seating vending machines that's what we could fit and we and it's a great site and we know that because how much people how many people come on a daily basis but then we went and we found other sites hey this is a you know we found in our apex north carolina location which is just outside raleigh the suburbs of raleigh we cut our first ribbon there that was a hundred year old gas station we thought that'd be really cool right let's let's let's take a hundred gas station and make it the service station of the it was closed down it was yeah it was closed i mean it was a service station that was opened in the early 1900s shut down the 60s or 70s and became a uh i think they were selling kitchen granite top right when we took it over so that that was that was so we so we that was unique because we made we made that into an experience that one has a local entrepreneur that sells baked goods out of that site and the reason for that was because the zoning requirements meant that you couldn't have a refueling center but you could have a local restaurant or bakery so that's so it's classified as just that and oh so it's technically a bakery with charging chargers exactly yep 100 right so So we've been very flexible as we work with cities and towns and very flexible with the types of sites that we're buying or leasing to, again, bring really great charging to customers.

37:47And we've done that. There's a list of sites I can give you. Each one has a story of an old gas station, of an old natural gas station, of an old car dealership, of an old Subway's restaurant that we've taken over and we've converted it to an ionic rechargery. Interesting. The chargers themselves, you're working with eight automakers um i'm sure they all have their own apps they all have their own gizmos how do you make the like the literally the plugging in and charging itself how do you make that consistent across all those apps across all those different kinds of vehicles across the the two basic kinds of hookups what does the charger look like and what does the software look like and what is the experience like?

38:36Am I scanning a card? Am I tapping a card? Am I, you know, is it, is this something where it recognizes the car when I pull up and I don't have to do anything? What is the experience of charging itself like? Yeah, well, I'll start with the one thing you don't do is download an Iona app because there is no Iona app. Oh, really? There's no separate app. There's no app, you know, and there's no intention to make a mobile app. And the reason for that is because to your point, every OEM, every automaker has an app today ChargePoint has an app. Presto has an app. ED Connect has an app. I can go on and on.

39:07So we actually have 14 different apps that you can use at IANA, but none of them are IANA. And on top of that, every charging station has a credit card reader on it. And we've got, you know, plug-in charge and auto charge with, you know, a significant number of OEMs, even beyond just our eight, right? So we have the eight investors that we've turned on plug-in charge for most of them. The rest coming very soon. But we've also turned on. So that means, so just to clarify for listeners, that means I can drive up, grab the charger, stick it in my car, and it recognizes my car and will charge it to my account without my scanning anything or tapping or doing anything.

39:44Exactly. A frictionless experience for drivers. And that's for some OEMs, but not others. Yeah. So on our eight OEMs today, the majority of it has have it activated and the rest are getting ready to launch this year. but we've also turned it on for Ford drivers, Rivian drivers and Volvo drivers as well. So again, we're looking for ways to reduce friction in the charging world for all drivers that drive EVs. Do you think that's gonna, do you think the sort of momentum is everything's gonna end up there? Like just plug and charge is going to be kind of the default within a few years? I think so.

40:22I mean, I think it's, I think it's a great experience, right? You're not, fumbling with with key cards or credit cards etc so i do think so i think it just takes time and how do you ensure reliability like i'm sure all the other previous makers of chargers wanted reliability as well and probably boasted a lot about it and then they you know still today you show up to a lot of these and they just don't work like what what are you doing to ensure high reliability? I think there's three ingredients that go into making this reliability cake, we'll call it. Number one is really around alerting, monitoring, and diagnostics.

41:04And we've built a lot of in-house tools in terms of our ability to monitor and to detect when there's an issue at a location or on the network as a whole or at a site. And so that then leads to operationally how we built our processes and how we respond to things so if there's an issue how fast can we respond to the detection uh do we have parts on site are we are we storing parts and hubs near sites and do we have labor nearby right yeah and do you you're are you sending an IANA employee or do you have like contractors like if there is a problem who are you sending and whose equipment are they using to fix it?

41:43It's both. So we have IANA employees and we're staffing up more in terms of IANA employees going out to sites. And we have third-party vendors that we also rely on for labor. So it's a combination of both and it's dependent upon how fast we can get someone to that site, which is really that third pillar. I was going to tell you, it was really culturally how we built the organization. You know, we have this idea of driver first and it lends itself to how do you get biased towards action of, you know, if we, So I'll give you an example. If we see an issue or a perceived issue at a site, customer calls in and says they had a problem charging, we do what's called a health check.

42:16We automatically roll a truck within less than 24 hours with some parts on hand. We have a Pelican case of parts that we go to the site with to validate, was it a real issue or was it something that happened with that particular customer? Because what we don't want to do is get a call in or see some sort of feedback on social media and assume it was probably the driver or it was a one-off situation. We want to get eyes on the site as fast as possible and validate that the next driver won't have a problem. Got it. And what are you, and is the promise here, you know, like, is there a percentage reliability?

42:53Is there some sort of target or cutoff here? Like, what can you realistically promise? I mean, I assume 100%. I mean, the thing is, like, gas stations, people don't think about it, but you basically get 100 % reliability at gas stations. Like, you know, every gas, every gas pump works to a, you know, maybe with like a 0.001 remainder. Is that kind of what, is that the goal here? Basically, like it all, it all works all the time. Like what is, is there a, is there a metric you're shooting for? Yeah, we have several metrics that we shoot for internally. You know, it kind of goes back to like our utilization is certain things we don't share externally in terms of the actual statistics and numbers but what we are looking for is to ensure that drivers can always get a charge on the first try and like things do break i mean i think if you go to a gas gas station there's lots of data actually on gas station performance that if you looked up you might be surprised at how low the numbers are in terms of what numbers they hit but like if you go to a gas station um and it's been a while but like you know you might see yellow bags over the handle right because they are broken and things do break it's like this is these are mechanical devices they're electro-mechanical devices, things break.

44:04So it's really a question of when they break, how fast can you action it? And the only way you can action it fast is, did you detect it? Did you have parts nearby? Did you have labor to go fix it? And that's where we're hyper-focused on is all three of those. A broader question, which is, you know, I don't know if you just saw the article that's just out in the New York Times a couple of days ago, basically about the The U.S. EV market is not in good shape. You know, unlike EV markets almost everywhere else, which are booming right now for obvious reasons, EV sales are slowing down in the U.S.

44:44The consumer credit is gone as of this month. The credit for building chargers, I think, is going away next year. these NEVI grants from the DOE, from the Department of Energy, have been clawed back or eliminated by the Trump administration. And like, it's grim. It's a grim time. Are you worried at all? I mean, and not only is it a grim time, but some of the automakers are U.S. automakers. I think even some of the ones involved in your consortium there are explicitly pulling back. on evs canceling evs canceling models and such so are you worried about launching during this what is clearly a downturn and i'm not sure anybody knows exactly how long it will last are you worried about launching in this environment no actually the reason i say it like that is because i i think i think evs are a really great product um in terms of their performance in terms of their acceleration, in terms of how quiet it is to drive it.

45:56And when you look at where battery prices are going, charging speeds are going, the range that they're going, it's a great product. And great products always win out. There's lots of examples throughout the course of human history about industries that were never going to go away until they went away because the new incumbent device or technology was just a better solution. And I think that's honestly where we are with electrification. It's taking time to get there, but I have no doubt. And I think, look, I think to add to that, I mean, I think, look, right now charging is still a problem in the U.S.

46:30It's gotten a lot better. But we know that we've added sites this year and we see really great turnout of drivers coming to our sites and we're learning from them. And we also know that more EVs are going to be sold this year or next year, without a doubt. And so to me, that tells me that there's a really good market today that's going to be even bigger in the future that we're going to go serve. How much is your business or your business plans or your business projections, your revenue projections, et cetera, sensitive to government policy, sensitive to sort of incentives and regulations at the government level?

47:04Are you trying to build something that can operate independently of those? I think we went after Nevi for one or two sites, but didn't actually collect it or spend it. You know, we are not looking to build out a Nevi-funded network. we're not we're not actively going out there and trying to go find grants we should say what nevi is i didn't write down what it stands for what national yeah national electric electric vehicle infrastructure yeah yeah these are grants from the doa for for charging infrastructure right that they push out to this yeah exactly they push out to the states and it was a way to you know to think back before iana was here was it was a way to try to get the market moving to get infrastructure out there particularly on corridors and so we're not looking for for federal or state grants to go build out this network.

47:45We're moving at a speed to really unlock electrification in partnership with the OEMs. So you think that even the OEMs that are pulling back on selling EV vehicles are going to remain committed to building out charging infrastructure? I think the future is electric. I think there's probably a debate as to whether it's 30%, 20%, 50%. But I think the future is electric. And I think that's why that is why Ana exists today with eight OEMs because that's where the future is going. And it's not just going that way in the U.S. It's going that way globally. Yeah. And part of this, I guess, you know, I was trying to get around this with the sort of economics questions, but like already this, you know, the DC charging is not a great business just purely in terms of revenue.

48:37And you're sort of like, in some sense, doing it in the most expensive possible way. You're owning your own land, you're building amenities, you're investing a lot of CapEx. I wonder to what extent is this whole enterprise kind of a loss leader for the OEMs to help them sell more cars, to help them sell more EVs? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but is this meant to be a money-making play or is this meant to be let's make it easier to sell more cars sell more evs and that's where the the profit will be made no iana needs to be iana is financially independent or independent it's a separate entity right and so we have to be profitable over time um infrastructure as a whole needs to be profitable over time because if electric if electric infrastructure charging is not profitable electrification won't work.

49:32But again, I think you see around the world where it can work. It requires obviously a higher density of vehicles being sold, which is where the market is going in the US. But yeah, we are working to become profitable over time, for sure. Yeah. And speaking of which, Ionity, you mentioned this earlier, it's kind of a parallel, similar venture in Europe, a bunch of automakers getting together, investing in charging stations. It's been up and running longer than you. It's had a lot more investment than you. And Ionity now is reaching to the point where they don't need to be funded by the automakers anymore.

50:11They have reached a point now where they're getting infrastructure funds and banks will come finance it because it's a stability and a sort of ubiquity now that they're getting access to big institutional capital. How far away is Iona from that? Because that's, you know, Ionity is operating in a market where EV sales are growing at like 30 plus percent, whereas they're shrinking here. So I wonder how far away are you from being able to access bigger, cheaper capital? Yeah. So right now we are well capitalized to achieve our goals and the mission that we're on. So I'm not really worried about outside capital or about what that timeline looks like before we go even talk about that.

50:58I think for us, it was always go demonstrate that you can build sites and deliver different experience. We've done that. Demonstrate you could build something across the country that you would start to drive customers from a network approach. We did that last year. This year is really around giving scale and density and key geographic markets, which is what we're currently working on. And so I think we're well on our way in terms of what the goals are that we laid out two and a half years ago. And we've got what we call this multi-wave strategy that we're on in terms of how we think about each year and what gate we're trying to pass as we move at the sign of speed to get sites live for customers.

51:38And speaking of the geography, one question here is like the obvious sort of like, I guess, capitalistic incentive is to go with your chargers to where the EVs are. you know, so like go to California or go to mainly go to cities, you know, like that's kind of where most EV owners are. How does this, and maybe this just isn't your business and you don't care, but like how do more rural or sparsely populated or just like unsaturated markets, markets where there aren't a lot of EVs yet, how are they going to get charging? There's always this chicken and egg thing, right? Are you willing to go sort of invest in a place that doesn't have much EVs yet, assuming they will come if you invest?

52:25Or like, what's, how do you think about that chicken and egg problem? Yeah. So, I mean, we just opened a site in Gary, Gary, Indiana. It's three days old or four days old and it's doing really well. So that is not California. And it's not the first place you go think to go put chargers, but honestly it's outpacing some of our utilization in California sites have been open six, nine months. And again, we went out and said from early on, we're going to build a network. Some of that will be California. Some of it will be Florida. Today in Florida, I think we're up to about 20 sites across the state.

52:56We're one of the largest, largest networks now, high power charging networks in the state of Florida as a whole. And so to your point, there's demand, there's supply. California has a lot of demand, but also has a lot of supply. And we're still building there. But there's also places like Gary that have demand, but don't have enough supply. And so we go put a charger there and all of a sudden you see that demand gets soaked up by a new ion rechargery. So we're trying to meet the needs of both. I would say we're trying to meet the needs right now wherever there is demand today. And then we have a big pipeline of sites where we think there'll be increased demand in the future.

53:31so i'm guessing to some extent like the sites that that can guarantee high utilization can at least in some time frame help subsidize the sites that do not yet have high utilization is that kind of how you're thinking about it to get back to this sort of network point exactly it's a network it's a network right and i think like you think back to like the telecom world you know if you bought a cell phone back in the early 90s and i said to you you can only use it in this town, it would be very useless to you across the country. But it doesn't mean that you'd have a ton of activity as you were driving.

54:08So it's a similar situation with the network effect. There's some sites right now that are lower than other sites in the network. But as a whole, the network is performing or is on track to perform to where we want it to be for the year and going forward. So we recognize that. We also recognize that, you know, we've seen this as, you know, if we built one site on a corridor, It may not perform great, but when you start opening the other sites in that same corridor and you can provide a full network to that driver on that interstate, you start to see the network effect take place along all those sites now.

54:40Yeah, I mean, there is going to be some element of build it and they will come here. You know, like there is some truth to that. There is like people will wait to buy until they are confident that there's a network around them. I don't know if that's like measurable or quantifiable, but there is that dynamic definitely exists. exactly and you know to that point which we didn't talk about is you know as part of our relationship and partnership with the oems we've launched discounts charging discounts with our oem partners right and so that that was kind of step one of this step two will be you'll start to see us uh much more prevalent in in dealerships now partnering with the oem to talk about the benefit of iona which is not just reliable infrastructure but from an affordability standpoint there's now you know potential charging packages coming and discounts that we're offering etc.

55:27So this is definitely a network in partnership with the OEMs in every way possible, including unlocking future sales of EVs. Right. So you go into a dealership and part of the benefit of buying this EV versus that one is you get access to a reliable network at a set relatively cheap price for electricity. That's going to be like a sales incentive at some point. Let me ask briefly, quickly about Tesla. They are the kind of the 100 pound gorilla here in this space. I think they have something like half the ports in the country. They already have, I think, or at least they boast 99 % uptime. they've opened their network now where I think everybody can hook up to them, almost everybody.

56:19What is your value proposition relative to Tesla? Honestly, Tesla's done a great job building up their network. They were one of the early ones and they've done a great job in terms of the integration between the vehicles and their charging network. I think IANA has a real opportunity to deliver the same value to all eight of our investors, what we call our member OEMs, and beyond. And so we're hyper-focused on what is that end-to-end experience that you can have with any one of the OEMs that are invested into Ayana, everything from navigation and routing and searching and search optimization, because that's an entire ecosystem and approach.

57:03And I think that's what we can go deliver, not just for one manufacturer, but for all eight and beyond. So kind of the idea is any EV you buy among these eight OEMs, you'll have the same ease of experience and uptime that Tesla is now providing to Teslas. Exactly. And I think they've kind of slowed down their investment. I mean, didn't they pull back on their whole charging network and their whole charging team? Am I making that up? They are kind of taking their foot off the accelerator on that part, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, I can't really comment on what they're doing. I'm too hyper-focused on what we're doing and taking care of drivers.

57:42So you'd have to ask Tesla what Tesla's doing on that front. But I mean, look, they've done a great job. There's no doubt about it. Early on and building out reliable infrastructure and really, I'd say blazing a trail. But yeah, what we're focused on is really thinking about that entire driver experience beyond just charging in terms of what happens at that site from lighting, canopies, trash cans, amenities, et cetera. All right. Final question as we wrap up. All right. Two part question, sort of as you look ahead, five years, call it five years, 10 years, I'd like to hear a, your sort of fondest hope.

58:19Like what, what will it look like if you succeed? And then also I'd like to hear like, what, what keeps you awake at night? Like, Is it access to power? Is it competition from other chargers? Is it getting a return on your CapEx? Like, what is your greatest challenge or fear also? Those are good questions, David. I think there's, on what success looks like, there's two things I look at for that. One is people still talk about charging reliability. And I think when people stop talking about it, then I know that the industry as a whole has been successful right like you think about the old verizon commercials they'd walk around saying can you hear me now yes no one talks about that anymore do i have enough coverage right right cell phones are so ubiquitous everything we do in terms of that right so that's number one um and then i think the other thing too is that we've unlocked electrification in this country where charging is not the reason why people don't buy cars so that's that would be the first the first pillar and then in terms of my biggest fear you know like i think the business and i've seen it's been interesting being at Ayana for two and a half years because of how fast we're moving to build sites and grow the business.

59:29In a typical startup world, you take time to go plan things out and have a product, an idea, and then launch your product and get iterations on it. And we've been moving so fast that two and a half years at Ayana, honestly, in some ways, feels like we've been here five to seven years in a normal startup venture, right? And so we've had to grow up from building a business, hiring people, launching our first site, which is our product to having, you know, honestly, we'll have 150 sites open by the next week. Yeah. Those transitions are notoriously difficult from like the 15 person company to the 100 person company, et cetera.

1:00:02These are sort of notoriously just in terms of execution. Exactly. And so that's what keeps me up at night is, you know, making sure that we mature fast enough to make sure that we never compromise on that driver. Because as I was saying earlier in the podcast with you is like, there's real people tied to the charging at all hours of the night. And I just want to make sure that we're never compromising on that. But that takes us making sure that we're maturing and growing up and scaling to the needs of the drivers out there. All right. All right. Well, super interesting. Super interesting. And in your success world, this world where people no longer are talking about charging anxiety, where charging anxiety is gone, is that by 2030?

1:00:45Is that the idea here? Or do you think that's a longer term thing? Or is this something that like people listening to this pod can anticipate, you know, having in a reasonable timeframe? I'm honestly hoping it's next year. I mean, I think that's where I know I want to be from an Iona perspective and I'm hopeful that the whole industry gets there as well. Well, all right. Your lips to God's ears, I guess. All right, Seth, thanks for coming and talking to us through this. Super interesting. I'm always, you know, the charging experience is on the minds of every EV owner. So thanks for coming and talking through it with us.

1:01:21Absolutely. Thanks for having me, David. Great conversation. All right.

1:01:28Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to Volts, founded and hosted by me, David Roberts, produced by Nate Peavy, and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider telling a friend about Volts. That's how this show grows and survives, through word of mouth. See you next time.