Ionna will train dealership staff at a few hundred locations on how to charge EVs

Cutler's case for the training starts from his view that the cars are ready and the chargers are not ^[5]. "We very much feel that if we can do this right, we can enable EV adoption," he said ^[6]. Business Insider put the dealer side more bluntly: "The person selling you an EV may need a crash course in how to charge one" ^[12].

The front-line argument rests mostly on the program itself. Cutler's quoted diagnosis is about public charging. The case that salespeople hold back EV sales comes from Ionna's decision to train them and from Business Insider's framing of it ^[12]. The decision still says something about how Ionna reads its position. It can build stations on its own schedule. The dealer program depends on showrooms that sell its investors' brands ^[2].

A skeptic would start with the station count, and Business Insider does, calling the network "still tiny compared to Tesla" ^[13]. Ionna's 191 stations ^[7] are under 6.4 percent of Tesla's more than 3,000 ^[8][16]. Walmart has roughly 300 sites under construction outside its stores ^[9], more than Ionna has open ^[18]. The skeptic is right about scale. The answer available to Ionna is pace and quality. It added 101 stations between January and the start of October ^[15], about 11 a month ^[17], and JD Power ranked its stations the best fast-charging in the country in its 2026 test ^[14]. That ranking is a specific claim a trained salesperson can repeat to a buyer who has never used the network.

The timing is harder. Training is expected to start in the first quarter of 2027 ^[3], as automakers pare back EV offerings amid cooling sales growth ^[10]. Honda is one of the investor brands in the program ^[2], and next year it will have no new US vehicle that can plug into Ionna's network ^[11]. A Honda salesperson would be trained to explain a charging network with no new Honda on the lot that can use it. According to Business Insider, Cutler isn't worried; he compared EVs with early flat-screen TVs, which started expensive and limited in appeal and got cheaper and more capable as production scaled ^[20]. "I think it's a foregone conclusion; it's just a question of that percentage of sales," he said ^[19].

This quarter Ionna is still opening stations ^[7]. From early next year it will also be running training at a few hundred dealers ^[1][3]. Any rise in EV sales in the seven target cities ^[2] will reflect both, along with whatever the automakers put in the showroom. The report does not say what dealers get for taking part or how Ionna will judge whether the training worked. Cutler has set his own deadline. "I tell people, if at the end of this decade, we haven't helped move the needle along on EV adoption, then Ionna's failed," he said ^[4].