Ionna addresses one of the significant shortcomings of EV vehicles, public charging, by building charging stations with amenities similar to those of gas stations. This could be a massive game-changer for EVs.
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One of the significant differences between EVs and gas cars is the gas stations. For gas cars, even though they are relatively quick to fill up, many gas stations are connected to mini marts where you can get food, drinks, and stuff to read while your car is filling up and going to the bathroom. Up until recently, EVs only had chargers, and while they were often placed near shopping malls or large superstores, that often created more problems.
Well, Ionna is putting in charging stations that have mini-marts connected to them, and this is a far better approach than either stand-alone charging stations (where you often don’t even have bathrooms) or those connected to superstores or especially malls.
Why Public Charging Stations Tend To Suck
My first experience with an electric car was around 2009 in a Tesla Model S, and not only didn’t I have a Level 2 charger at home, but the closest Tesla also Fast Charger was at an outlet Mall around 25 miles from where I lived. And I found that the entire time I had that car, I was searching for chargers and found them largely disappointing. Most public chargers back then were only Level 2, so if we charged while eating or going to the movies, we only got a few miles of range from the charge. When we went to the outlet mall, some people had parked their Teslas to charge and decided to spend the day shopping because their cars sat in the charger spaces, fully charged, for hours.
Since then, I’ve seen people in gas cars at malls park in the charger spaces because the other spaces were total or to be jerks and experience the fun of trying to get a fast charger to work when it didn’t seem to want to and there was no one around from which to get help. In contrast, I have a performance gas station near me with a complex pump, which often requires help, but there is always someone around to provide that help, so getting performance fuel is never a problem.
Over time, I’ve watched EV owners try to put gas in their cars, figure out where the socket is for the charger, and need help to get the charger to turn on, with lots of frustration from remote support people who generally don’t seem to have any more clue about how this stuff works than the confused EV driver did.
What was needed is a charging experience similar to a gas station, where you can get help if you need it, have a bathroom handy, and if you want a snack, you can get it but not someplace where you might want to stay for hours or where a gas car user might want to park.
Ionna Charging Station
The Ionna Charging Station is very similar to a Gas station; it might even have repair bays (electric cars get flat tires and can need simple fixes, too). It has bathrooms, a lot of chargers, and places where gas cars can park if they want to enjoy the facilities without taking up a charging spot. They might even have food trucks at them, pulling in an even broader audience of people who don’t need to be there for long and might want to check out just how much better EVs have become with these stations.
They have pet-friendly amenities at the station because Fido also needs a bathroom break, and several car companies, including BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis, back the effort. They plan to build out 30K high-power EV chargers by 2030, and their facility is a natural replacement for existing gas stations, allowing a potential path for gas station operators better than going out of business once EVs are dominant.
This is a far better approach than the EVgo effort, which provides covered charging but not the amenities that Ionna is building out.
Wrapping Up:
One of the big problems with EVs is public charging because the experience isn’t as convenient as filling up with gas. Ionna is on the right path, building charging stations that mirror gas stations and provide the kind of services we are used to with gas cars, making the switch to EVs far more painless.
Given how long we’ve had gas cars, it is impressive that it took this long to realize that EV owners might want the same experience.
Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.
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