#616 2017 · BMW Group / Daimler / Ford / Volkswagen Group (Audi, Porsche) — IONITY joint venture · Automotive / electric vehicle infrastructure
Four rivals who compete on every other feature of an electric car agreed not to compete on the one thing none of them could build alone
问题
Electric cars couldn't win long-distance road trips because no single automaker could justify building a continent-wide fast-charging network on its own
背景
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. For any one traditional automaker to match that strategy, it would need to fund and build charging infrastructure at a continental scale using only its own EV sales volume to justify the investment — a cost none of them could rationalize carrying alone in a market still small enough that most EV buyers weren't choosing based on brand-specific charging networks yet.
换别人会怎么做
The standard competitive response to a market-critical infrastructure gap is to build a proprietary network as a competitive advantage, restricting it to your own brand's customers, the approach Tesla had already taken with its Supercharger network to differentiate its own vehicles from every other electric car on the market.
他们看到了什么
BMW, Daimler, Ford, and Volkswagen saw that fast-charging infrastructure wasn't actually a product they were competing on — it was a shared precondition for the entire electric-vehicle market existing at a scale any of them could sell meaningfully into. Competing to build separate, smaller proprietary networks meant none of them individually would reach the density needed to make long-distance EV travel viable, so the fight over whose network was better was being fought one level below where the real constraint actually sat.
那一手
In November 2017, four normally competing automakers — BMW Group, Daimler, Ford, and the Volkswagen Group (including Audi and Porsche) — formed IONITY, a jointly owned company to build and operate a high-power charging network across Europe, open to any manufacturer's electric vehicles rather than restricted to their own brands. Rather than each company building a smaller proprietary network, they split the capital cost of roughly 400 initial high-power stations evenly, treating the charging infrastructure as a shared industry precondition rather than a competitive product to hoard.
为什么管用
By pooling capital across four automakers instead of each funding its own smaller network, IONITY could reach the station density and geographic coverage needed to make long-distance EV travel genuinely practical years faster than any single company's EV sales volume alone could have justified. Because the network is brand-agnostic rather than restricted to the founding companies' own vehicles, it grows the entire addressable EV market those companies sell into, rather than just shifting existing EV buyers between competing proprietary networks — a bigger total market benefits all four founders more than a slightly larger share of a smaller one would have.
值了多少
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. Additional manufacturers including Hyundai and Kia later joined the venture or gained preferential access through it, and the network became a standard, brand-agnostic option available to EV drivers regardless of which car they were charging.
什么时候会失灵
The approach depends on the infrastructure genuinely being a shared precondition rather than a source of real competitive differentiation — if fast, dense charging access itself is what wins customers (as it arguably has been for Tesla), pooling it away removes a lever competitors might otherwise use to differentiate their vehicles. It also requires the founding companies to agree on governance, investment pace, and access terms despite being direct competitors in every other part of the business, a coordination cost that can slow decisions a single company acting alone wouldn't face.
后来呢
IONITY remains one of Europe's largest high-power EV charging networks and is frequently cited in automotive and infrastructure circles as a model for competitor collaboration on shared market-enabling infrastructure, with its brand-agnostic, jointly funded structure referenced in discussions of how competing companies can jointly solve an infrastructure gap that blocks an entire emerging market rather than treating it as ground to fight over individually.
资料来源
- [1]BMW, Daimler, Ford and Volkswagen team up on high-power charging networkTechCrunch, 2017techcrunch.com
- [2]Complete guide to the IONITY rapid-charging networkDrivingElectric, 2024drivingelectric.com