Four automakers built a shared EV charging network

By the mid-2010s, electric vehicles remained a hard sell for long-distance travel: a fast-charging network dense enough for a driver to actually plan a road trip around only pays off once it reaches a certain scale, and no single automaker's EV sales volume alone could justify the capital cost of building that scale across an entire continent. Existing charging infrastructure was fragmented across many smaller operators with inconsistent speeds and coverage, leaving long-distance EV travel impractical for most drivers regardless of which brand of electric car they owned.

The standard competitive instinct in a young market with a critical infrastructure gap is to build a proprietary network as a moat, the approach Tesla had already taken with its own Supercharger network reserved for its own vehicles.

Four rivals pooled capital into IONITY, a shared brand-agnostic network, treating infrastructure as a market precondition, reaching density faster.

Pooling capital let them reach critical station density faster than any single company could alone.

A brand-neutral network grows the total EV market, benefiting all founders more than a proprietary moat would.

Shared ownership split the capital cost, making the investment rational for each automaker.

Open access avoided fragmenting charging infrastructure, making long-distance EV travel practical.

When a shared infrastructure gap blocks an entire market, competitors can jointly fund the missing piece instead of each building a smaller proprietary version.

IONITY grew from an initial commitment of around 400 stations into one of Europe's largest fast-charging networks, expanding under a further €700 million investment announced in 2021 toward a goal of nearly 7,000 charging points across roughly 1,000 locations by 2025; by November 2024 the network had grown to more than 690 stations and over 4,400 high-power charging points across 24 European countries.