What’s next for Ionity? Interview with CEO Jeroen van Tilburg

Enabling electric mobility over long distances – that was the primary goal of Ionity, which was founded on behalf of several major car manufacturers. With its fast-charging stations on motorways, Ionity was to help shareholders from the VW Group, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Ford and later Hyundai-Kia to sell their electric cars more effectively. The vision was to quickly charge for a few minutes on the journey between two major cities and then continue on.

With more than 5,000 charging parks in 24 European countries, Ionity has now achieved this part of its mission – long-distance charging is now possible, only with Ionity locations. If you add the fast chargers of other operators, it becomes even more convenient. But what’s next for Ionity in the coming phase?

Ionity is also a founding member of the Spark Alliance – a consortium of four major providers who want to lay nothing less than the foundation for the “largest and most reliable public charging network in Europe.” We spoke to Ionity CEO Jeroen van Tilburg about the alliance, the future strategy, Ionity’s new fleet service and charging prices.

Mr van Tilburg, a few weeks ago, Ionity founded the Spark Alliance together with three other CPOs to simplify charging electric vehicles in Europe. Can you briefly describe the basic idea behind the alliance? How did the alliance of these four partners come into existence?

The alliance was formed by these four players because we all saw the same challenge in the industry. There are currently plenty of charging options, but to the point that the landscape is quite fragmented with many different players, many different speeds, different expectations around reliability and uptime. Different station sizes, different ways to pay. And that is quite confusing for lots of people.

There are so many options that people feel overwhelmed, especially if you’re new to EV ownership. If you are an experienced EV driver, you probably know your way around, you know how to adjust your behavior. You’re familiar with the difference between AC, DC and HPC charging. But with this next wave of EV adoption, we need to take on that responsibility in providing clarity. A few years ago, everybody jumped into this new charging industry like in the gold rush. Energy companies, oil companies or other players who treat charging as a side job – not making it their core business.

But in the Alliance, we’re all pure play CPOs, charge point operators. It’s our core business. It’s our bread and butter and our business relies on this. We have naturally found one another because we have so many shared values and consider ourselves to be leaders in this industry. So we created the Spark Alliance as a quality mark.

Let me give you an example: If you want to buy a new TV set and you go to the local electronics store, there are hundreds of TV sets in the store. You don’t know which one to choose. They all look the same. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but with all of them you can watch TV. What can help you with your decision is a mark like Dolby Atmos or THX. You don’t have to know all the technical details, but you know this TV delivers the quality that you are looking for.

But isn’t it like the same problem with what you described that an experienced EV driver knows things like AC, DC or which CPO is a high quality one? New users see roaming apps with 800,000 charge points or more. And that looks good to them. So how will the Spark Alliance differ from standard roaming platforms? And how will you get to know with your values that you described?

The Alliance is not meant to replace roaming platforms or MSPs. MSPs provide seamless access to AC, DC and HPC. We are essentially HPC players.

And we encourage our MSP partners to embrace the Alliance as a quality mark within their offerings. Out of the one million charge points across Europe – which should you choose for a great experience? If the MSP offers a filter or a special feature for Alliance sites, it can guide customers toward a good charging experience – just like the Dolby Atmos mark does when choosing a new TV.

So again, it helps people make the right choice. Maybe you and I are experienced drivers who’ve already gone through the growing pains. But we should really look at the next wave of EV adoption, the mass adoption. They don’t have the same tolerance for the things that you and I have been going through. And this is where we want to build confidence in EV ownership.

One big pain point for mass adoption is the pricing structure and payment. How will you try to solve within the alliance? As I understand it, if I charge via the Ionity App at a Fastned station, I pay the Ionity tariff, right?

Not at the stage we’re currently at. We could have decided to make this perfect and wait another year to get where we want to be. But we don’t have that time. The transition is happening now.

What we’re now trying to do, before people start traveling for their summer holidays, is route users to the Alliance stations. For example, you are a German Ionity customer and you spend your holidays in the Netherlands. We don’t yet have the network density in the Netherlands that we aim for. With Fastned, we have a great partner that we recommend if you’re looking for a similar experience to what you’re used to as an Ionity customer. Through our app, we direct you to their stations and display their locations. When you’re ready to start charging, you’ll be redirected to their ad-hoc payment option. This will be the initial experience. Eventually, we aim to make this process more seamless, so that you’ll be charged directly through your Ionity account when using a Fastned station.

And in the longer term, we may be able to offer a favorable tariff for using that station via our app. But it is a step-by-step approach, it starts by making the stations visible as a recommendation.

Still sounds OK for an experienced user, but complicated for new users. Isn’t that a bit too little too late with the Alliance?

I wish we had had this vision years ago but now we’re coming together and taking fair responsibility, and I think that’s something truly unique — after all, we’re still competitors. We’re competing for the same locations and customers.

We need to accelerate this transition to EVs. And this is where we are all committed, mission-driven and have found a very natural and complementary partnership.

When it comes to complex pricing structures, for many people Ionity is part of the problem. Let’s take the pricing from Germany: 69 cents without registration, 65 cents with registration and pay-as-you-go, 49 cents for a simple subscription with a monthly basic fee and just 39 cents for a higher subscription. Ionity will certainly not get rich by charging a monthly fee of 11.99 euros, especially with heavy users, and the turnover with these customers is lower than with the ad-hoc price. We won’t even look at the prices from roaming apps at this point. Isn’t it all too complicated? How do you explain this to customers who are familiar with the daily prices displayed for petrol and diesel?

Well, it’s definitely a journey that we’re still on. Reaching the maturity and simplicity of a gas station network takes time. But even if you make that comparison, I’d argue it’s not a perfect one — there are still differences in fuel pricing that many people don’t fully understand. Why does it cost more to fuel up on the highway than just off it? So even there, pricing isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

We are still a new industry with huge upfront investments that we need to try to recover. Currently, the best way all of us have found is through subscription models. And we try to keep them as limited as possible.

But at the same time, we need to think about the economics of our stations, too. It’s no secret that the more frequent users we have returning to our network, the better pricing we can offer. I think as an industry, if we do this right, we can continue to optimize and improve.

And I envision a future where we can offer real-time, dynamic pricing, depending on low energy costs when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. But that requires huge investments in our backends to enable deeper integration with the energy market. That’s the vision we are working toward.

We acknowledge that it can still be overwhelming and confusing for many drivers, but with the four models we offer, we believe we’ve already simplified things significantly. It’s not yet at the level of the gas station business, but they’ve been around for several decades. And they have very high station utilization, because there are still more ICE vehicles on the road than EVs. So for me, this is a matter of time.

Ionity currently has around 750 locations in 24 countries. You just reached 5,000 charging points. When Blackrock joined as a investor at the end of 2021, 1,000 locations with 7,000 charging points were announced by 2025. Will you still manage to open 250 locations this year?

We are currently on a pace of adding an average of 125 new locations per year to our network. While that doesn’t quite align with the goals we set a few years ago, it does match the current pace of EV adoption. We operate based on an economic model. It reflects the challenges that every CPO faces when deploying charge points and sites across Europe.

These challenges vary from country to country. Many bottlenecks are well known. Permitting processes have only become more difficult over the years in many countries. We also faced supply chain issues during COVID. Plenty of challenges that have kept us from fully living up to that ambition.

We’re growing at a healthy pace, adding those 125 sites to our network. But perhaps most importantly, it’s the number of charging points we’re adding — not only through new sites, but also by upgrading existing ones. With our initial goal of pan-European coverage largely achieved, we’ve also been able to shift our focus toward urban areas, which will play a key role in our next phase of growth.

Can you name a few countries where it’s easier to build charging stations? I assume Germany is one of the harder ones with our regulations and our energy market.

Well, the German market presents particular challenges, starting with the grid operators. There are several hundred different operators in Germany. So we are constantly having to adjust to slightly different requirements. I think it’s no surprise that Germany is not known for fast permitting processes. So that’s not helping, but every country is unique.

Using the Netherlands, my home country, as an example: Six years ago, it took only about three months to get a grid connection. It was known as one of the countries where deployment was fastest. Fast forward to today, it takes until 2028 or 2029 to get a grid connection. This is how rapidly the industry is changing. France is relatively convenient from a grid perspective. They operate their grid with just a handful of operators. The permitting processes in Spain, on the other hand, are a complete black box.

You mentioned the urban charging parks. So far, the urban charging parks of Ionity are more on the outskirts of cities near the motorway. So how far into the cities do you want to go?

Basically, think about the ring roads. But again, when it comes to challenging conditions, urban expansion isn’t easy — land is even more scarce, and power is scarce, so we need to find the sweet spots in every city. Where are the main traffic routes? Where is a convenient place to spend 20 to 30 minutes? Our broader urban expansion strategy is still in development, and we are focused on finding the right spots.

Where you are based — Munich?

Dusseldorf.

Okay, it’s been years since I was last in Dusseldorf. We’re not aiming to be located right in the Altstadt or on Königsallee. It’s really about the ring road, where we can combine charging with other activities. The sweet spot is being close to shopping malls or amenities.

With this strategy, we’re targeting two distinct user groups. One is private drivers who don’t have access to home charging, meaning those relying primarily on public on-street AC charging infrastructure. With our urban sites, we give this audience the opportunity to charge their EV once a week during their shopping activities, for example. We need to find locations that make charging convenient for those drivers. The other user group includes professional drivers — such as taxi and delivery services — who can make a significant contribution to cleaner cities. So with a good location on the ring road, we can give taxi drivers the confidence to switch to EVs – where they can quickly top up for ten minutes or so
between customers.

A few months ago, Ionity also announced their own fleet service. Why should fleet customers use the Ionity service when they only can use Ionity charging points? After all, there are fleet providers with 800,000 plugs or more.

Great question again. We have developed our fleet service based on customer feedback. We received many requests from larger fleet owners who said, ‘I love your network and would prefer to use only your network. Could you make me a special offer?’

And I think that is a testimony to the work that we’ve been doing. We’ve built a sizable network that many customers can rely on exclusively. And hence, we’ve created the fleet offer with special tariffs to make it easier for fleet owners. Instead of signing up for our consumer offer like our Power tariff — we offer them the convenience of a single monthly bill. So we’re helping them reduce their administrative effort. At the same time, we have traditional MSP partners who are developing their own fleet offers as well which specifically serve customers who need AC charging or broader network access.

Ionity has not yet made the prices for fleet customers public. There are two different tariffs which are – at least in Germany – quite clouse to the private customer offers. So the main difference is the monthly billing process?

Monthly billing — and like any company that is in a commercial business, the larger the fleet and the higher the utilization, the better the tariffs we’ll be able to offer. That’s why we create an offer upon request and based on the individual needs of each customer.

Before you joined Ionity, you were responsible for Tesla’ s Supercharger business in Europe and elsewhere. What can Ionity learn from Tesla?

That’s a big question! I’ll try to break it down into three points. Number 1: It’s still impressive what Tesla did in the early days when EVs were considered not to be a viable alternative for long-haul driving. Tesla built their own charging network to remove that concern. They had a mission – just like the OEMs behind Ionity when they founded the company. If we are serious about the transition to EVs, we need to overcome those hurdles, as Tesla demonstrated, even if competitors have to work together. This similar mindset has brought us the Spark Alliance – we are competitors today, but we are united in our long-term mission.

Number 2: Think big. Tesla didn’t know back in 2012 if there would be growing demand for their EVs, but they built their chargers anyway. That’s what we are all repeating today: to build our network ahead of the curve. Every CPO takes a risk in building a station in the hope of future demand.

That leads us to number 3: Don’t think in terms of risks. Tesla doesn’t think in terms of risks; they think in terms of opportunities. And that is very uncomfortable for many companies. But if you believe in your mission, that is what you have to do: embrace the opportunity and act on it.

And vice versa: what do you think Ionity is already doing better today?

We are universal. We are serving all customers equally, regardless of brands. Our chargers have always been compatible with all EVs, starting with long cables to reach the charge port. With up to 400 kW, we have been building a future-proof network. New 800V models coming to the market in 2025 are benefiting from our power promise that we made on day one. We deliver what we promise.