Like, why is growth where it is right now? Why hasn't it reached the heights that were predicted, you know, five years ago?

It's a great question.

And I think, you know, I think people, to your point, often equate it to gas stations.

I know I've been much more equating it to cellular communications or cell towers.

Right.

Because I remember my parents getting their first cell phone in the early 90s as a kid to 2026.

Think about how many decades it took before people said, hey, I'm going to get rid of my landline and only rely on a cell phone.

What did you have to do to make the whole business function and work without a dedicated app for payments and charging, locating and everything like that?

But in terms of that, uh, I can't imagine the undertaking de- how much of the stack does Iona own or is- are we working with a lot of great third-party partners on this? How, how does that work?

Yeah.

So, so I think to, to, to your first part, which I think resonates really closely to me, is that to your point, you know, talking about a good charging experience that it worked is not very exciting, uh, honestly, right? But there, but there is a lot that goes into, into making that work, and I always use the analogy of nobody goes to a restaurant and talks about the great meal they had, um, or right, or, or the fact they didn't get food poisoning.

They'll talk about the fact that it was a great meal.

And I think that's the difference here, or the, or the analogy here is we need to make sure that charging becomes the equivalent of it works every time.

Just like when I go to a restaurant, I'm not talking about how I didn't get sick.

That's, that's expected at the restaurant.

Can you break down what a relay, what a rechargeary is, and what a beacon is?

Mm-hmm

... all of a sudden now you 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 maybe h- may have been acceptable in 2017, 2018 was no longer acceptable when people needed to charge, and a six-bay site became a two-bay site at that time.

And, 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.

And I think by and far, I'd say the industry has come a long way in 2026, 2025 than where it was in 2020 and 2022.

And that brings us to kind of this, this current phase that I look at as phase four of the market, and this is really where IonA is playing, which is how do you think about the experience beyond just reliability, you know? And the analogy I always give is, you know, folks typically don't look to see which restaurants will cause food poisoning.

Yeah, and do you, you're, are you sending an IonA employee or do you have, like, contractors? Like, if there is a problem, who are you sending and what, and whose equipment are they using to fix it?

tale.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think the OEMs have been working on this for quite some time.

And actually, there's history that goes even beyond this joint venture.

There's been talks about doing a joint venture in North America going back to like 2015 even when Ionity was announced in the U.S. And that effort fell apart.

um but it got revitalized by the by the car companies back in like i think 2022 is when they started talking about this again and so july of 23 uh the seven seven automakers at the time toto joined a year later announced they were gonna form ayana and so uh they put together a board a management board uh comprised of individuals from each of the oems so i effectively have eight bosses which is which is awesome which is great um But actually it's been a good partnership.

And so I was hired as employee number one in February of 2024.

Who's the customer you're targeting specifically, would you say?

How do you think about building it out right now, knowing that there's a lot in flux in the market at this point and where that ultimately goes?

Yeah, it's interesting.

I've been in this space for 15 years now, which just shows how old I'm getting.

The thing is, if you look back 10 years ago, folks were building out charging networks, betting on the company.

They were betting that cars were going to get sold, betting the technology was going to be there.

The best part about IANA, and look, we have the advantage of not being the first, but being maybe the second or third, is that there are cars already.

There are great cars on the road right now in market and coming out next year and the year after that have long range, have fast charge rates that are really fantastic vehicles that people want to drive.

When you look at that, what are kind of the things that you do when you focus on efficiency or you try to be lean? How does that approach kind of guide the overall idea and launch and deployment of these stations?

In the condensed version, talk about really the last 22 months or so and really the idea from company idea to now having charging stations up and operable.

Yeah, it's interesting.

So, the car companies came together with this idea back and they announced it back in 2023, summer of 2023.

I was hired as employee number one.

So, I started early February of 2024.

So, less than two years ago, to your point, about 22 months.

And so, we spoke today at this media event as we kind of launch the beginnings of our network.

And so what are the, as far as those, you know, the amenities that you're putting in, whether it's co-locating, whether it's, you know, developing your own, what kinds of things are you looking at making sure that those, you know, kind of mid-tier and halo offerings have those things?