Not so long ago, the century-old structure with the angled roof in Apex, North Carolina, was a Phillips 66 gas station, said mayor Jacques K. Gilbert. He liked riding there with his parents, he recalled, because “it sold honey buns.”
It’s definitely unlike any EV charging station you’ve been to. Ionna, the charging network founded by eight auto brands, worked with the community to redevelop it into a “Chargery.” That, it had to explain, would not be the gas station locals no longer wanted in the center of their town, but an asset to the historic fabric of Apex.
It’s the first of six Ionna sites that will be open by early February—and 100 by the end of 2025, providing more than 1,000 charging cables. The network intends to have 30,000 cables by the end of 2030, putting it among the largest North American charging networks.
Gallery: Ionna Rechargery: Apex, NC
The Ionna project was announced with mild fanfare in July 2023, though details were sparse. Then last June, it revealed its CEO, Seth Cutler, who expanded on the goals for the charging sites it planned. Toyota became its eighth automaker partner the next month, and the first “rechargery” project in Apex hit the news in October. The second site is in Houston, and now EV drivers have a handful of options—even if they don’t know the network even exists.
After several weeks of public trials, the Apex site is now officially open … but what does it tell us?
From bathrooms to meeting rooms
Amenities are a major part of the Ionna brand. In 2023, at CES, Mercedes-Benz CTO Markus Schäfer said the luxury brand wants charging stations in safe, well-lighted locations, “not in the backyard somewhere of a shopping center next to a dumpster.” Most of us would settle for the facilities at any decent gas station—which today are unimaginable luxuries at EV charging sites.
Every Ionna Beacon Rechargery will have a canopy over the charging stations—to protect drivers from rain and snow. Rechargeries will have squeegees to clean the windows, bins for any trash and an air hose to fill tires if needed. Y’know, just like gas stations? It’ll even have a hose that dispenses washer fluid, though there’s a small charge to prevent every driver in the area from filling up for free. No more having to buy an entire gallon for $7.95, though.
More revolutionary than those niceties, however, are the 24-hour bathrooms in a sheltered space with seats and vending machines. While the space isn’t always staffed, the bathrooms are accessed in off hours via a QR code (it requires a name and email address) that will remotely unlock the door, to ensure they’re only used by Ionna customers. Ionna notes, however, that its smaller "Rechargery Relays" will not always have these amenities. Canopies will be "preferred" and used when available, but restrooms and food options may only be "nearby," not on the premises.
But the Apex Rechargery—itself a relay concept—gets a lot of the goods. It includes a second section, open during daylight + high-traffic times, that includes a Zulia coffee bar with snacks, more seats and tables, and two “coworking rooms” that can be booked for conferences or privacy. There’s even a wall-mounted video terminal with dozens of arcade games pre-loaded, some decades old.
Antiglare screens, long cables
As for the charging stations themselves, the Apex site has 10, with potential for later expansion to 12 or even 15 slots if needed. Every cable can provide up to 400 Kilowatts, and it hangs from a swing arm that’s long enough to reach a rear charging port on an EV parked nose-in. The swing arm is even damped so it doesn’t yank the cable back when retracting.
Unlike Electrify America, Ionna stations are not “Plug in First” before validating the session. That was deliberate, to prevent the handful of EVs with short timing-out windows from aborting a session while a new user is still finding their way through the menus or fumbling for a credit card.
The screens are located on the sides of the charging station, not between the cables, which felt less cramped to this user. And all screens have an antiglare coating—despite being under a canopy that prevents direct sun glare in the first place.
All stations are the HyperCharger HYC400 from Italian firm Alpitronics; it supports both CCS and NACS connectors. Alpitronics builds its own power electronics modules, rather than buying them from third-party suppliers, which makes the stations quieter—with less noise from loud cooling fans—than those in other networks under the same conditions, according to Branden Flasch, its technical sales manager.
Good, better, best
Ionna’s sites nationwide will come in one of three basic formats.
At the top of the heap are what it calls Rechargery Beacon sites, its flagships, which will offer the most amenities, many with larger footprints and more charging cables than standard company-owned sites. It hopes to have at least one of these open this year—and, per Ionna CEO Seth Cutler, it’ll include an “AI-enabled Amazon store," with Just Walk Out technology.
The Apex site we visited represents the core offering for company sites, called a Rechargery Relay. Note that Ionna actually bought the site and its existing building, rather than simply leasing it. When properties are leased, Ionna execs said, the term is far longer than the 10 years that’s presently standard for other large networks.
Relay sites will average 12 stalls as the default, potentially up to 20, though a few may be smaller due to site constraints or other special features. Together, Beacon and Relay sites together will make up about 30 percent of the total, Cutler said.
Building a hospitality brand with ‘Americana”
The other 70 percent will be at selected retail partners, with 50 already announced with the Sheetz convenience-store chain in the East and Midwest, and more partners to come. These will provide charging stations under a canopy, along with trash bins, squeegees, and so forth. The bathrooms and snacks will be provided by the partner store. But the Ionna sites will be highly visible (those canopies) and located close to main store entrances rather than out on the far edge of a parking lot.
When you approach an Ionna site, you may not immediately identify it as an EV charging location. It doesn’t have the “tech-y” look of many networks, with their cool green or blue LED lights. The graphics are orange and turquoise on black, cheerful and retro, underscored by the Seventies and Eighties arcade games users can play if they choose to go inside the hospitality area.
“Hospitality is what separates our brand,” said Ricardo Stamatti, Ionna’s chief product officer. It’s a quintessentially ‘Americana” play on the “American values of travel and freedom.” The message to EV drivers, he said forcefully, is that “the network is built for you—the freedom, the choice, and the reliability you deserve.”
‘Ionna speed’, but also sheer reliability
During the day, executives from the eight automaker partners alluded frequently to “Ionna speed,” or the velocity at which sites are being scoped out, pinpointed, leased or bought, built or renovated, and brought online. It is, said vehicle executive marveled, very different indeed from the speed at which cars are designed, tested, and brought to market.
That inevitably raises the question: Will it be reliable? After all, every EV drivers has examples of major charging networks where rollout speed seems to have taken priority over reliable charging.
Cutler and other Ionna execs cited the testing done just to qualify the Apex site as ready for its public opening: 4,400 charging sessions, totaling 68 megawatt-hours, performed on more than 80 different models of EV (from the eight partners, but also from other makers as well).
Put more bluntly, “They tested the crap out of absolutely everything,” said Flasch of Alpitronics.
Reliability “can’t even be an issue, or any kind of consideration,” said Stamatti. “It has to be taken for granted, every time, for the brand to succeed.”
The backgrounds of Ionna’s staff and execs underscore that this ain’t their first time at the rodeo. Virtually all of them have relevant prior experience at other charging networks, or within the charging software groups at partner carmakers. Among other factoids, Ionna bought its own stock of spare parts for the Alpitronics hardware; it also has a backup contract with a third party if that first-line defense fails; and Stamatti said the company is fully prepared to fly its own tech teams to malfunctioning sites if needed.
The opening ceremonies themselves were blissfully short and to the point. CEO Cutler spoke, as did Apex Mayor Gilbert and the state’s newly appointed Department of Environmental Quality Secretary, Reid Wilson. Ten ribbons were cut: One per carmaker in each of eight stalls with a representative EV from each; a main one in front of a large video screen; and the 10th at Ionna’s nearby headquarters in Durham, shown on the screen in real time.
Notable attendees included local dealers—who often serve, Ionna execs said, as the company’s entrée to movers and shakers in specific communities, the Chamber of Commerce, and so forth. With dealers of eight different car brands accessible, they view that as a way to introduce the idea of new chargeries in new areas quickly and efficiently.
A major problem Ionna faces today is its almost total lack of brand awareness. That’s not too surprising; Electrify America had a similar challenge when it launched. But how Ionna plans to introduce itself to 1 million-plus U.S. electric-vehicle drivers remains to be seen. One potential plus: Ionna has eight separate EV makers that will add its sites to routing and navigation apps.
They will learn over the next few years whether Ionna can fulfill the ultimate goal CEO Cutler bluntly laid out: “We hope to be what charging always should have been.”
InsideEVs paid for the author to be flown to North Carolina for the Recharging opening and to get an electric rental car. It only took a few tries for the rental company to find one with more than 50 miles of indicated range.
