Seth Cutler, CEO of Ionna, has 110 charging sites live across 36 states, 50 more in active construction, and roughly 400 under contract working through permitting. The network is backed by eight automakers as a joint venture, not a VC-funded startup, and has been built without public funding. Ionna soft-launched its first site in December 2024 and reached approximately 1,000 charging bays within its first year of full operation, landing within a few weeks of its target. The InsideEVs Plugged In podcast also covers Google’s Gemini conversational navigation, which is rolling out to Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Polestar, and an estimated four million GM vehicles from 2022 model year onward, and Canada’s first Chinese EV imports following a tariff reduction to 6.1 percent on the first 49,000 units annually.
Ionna’s position in the public charging market is structurally different from Electrify America, which has been the most prominent non-Tesla network in the US and has struggled with reliability throughout its existence. Ionna is a joint venture among eight vehicle manufacturers who have a direct financial stake in making public charging work. That alignment between the infrastructure provider and the companies selling the cars is unusual, and Cutler frames it as the reason the accountability model is different. The analogy he uses is cellular coverage: a boutique charging network in one city is not useful to a driver planning a cross-country trip. The value of a charging network scales with its footprint, which is why Ionna has prioritized national reach over local density, even at 110 sites. At 400 kW per stall, the hardware is at or above what every current production EV sold in the US can accept. The question of whether to install higher-power hardware is being evaluated against when the vehicles that need it actually exist in the market in meaningful numbers.
The Gemini navigation segment is the most immediately practical part of the podcast. A host tested the feature in a Volvo EX60 during a press drive in Barcelona and found it handled multi-condition route queries faster and more accurately than expected. Asking for a 350 kW fast charger near a park where a dog can walk, or finding a charging stop near restaurants with gluten-free menu options, produced useful results conversationally in ways that would normally require pulling out a phone and running several separate searches. The integration in Google Built-In vehicles goes further than Android Auto: it connects natively with the car’s route planner and charge stop logic, so results show up as waypoints, not just information. Limitations noted include occasional misreading of intent and the AI being overly chatty with follow-up suggestions. On the Canada story, a survey cited in the episode found 55 percent of Canadians who intend to buy a new vehicle would consider a Chinese EV, compared to 51 percent of Americans in equivalent surveys. The 49,000-unit annual quota is small enough that Tesla’s China-built Model 3, which recently launched in Canada at around the equivalent of $29,000 US, is expected to consume a substantial portion.
Bottom line: The Ionna interview is the most grounded public charging conversation to appear in the podcast format in some time. Cutler’s accountability framing and the site count give the optimism some grounding. The real test is whether Ionna’s network becomes dense enough that an EV driver on a long trip can rely on it as a first choice rather than a fallback. At 110 sites, it is not there yet. The contracted pipeline of 400-plus suggests it could be inside two years.