This CEO wants to challenge Tesla’s charging dominance. He’s teaching dealerships how to make the EV pitch.

The person selling you an EV may need a crash course in how to charge one.

Ionna, a fast-charging network backed by eight large automakers, is preparing to train dealership staff at a few hundred locations, its CEO, Seth Cutler, told Business Insider.

The company expects to target dealers in Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Dallas, San Francisco, San Jose, and Raleigh.

The program, expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027, will operate at dealers that sell cars made by Ionna’s investors: Toyota, Honda, General Motors, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Jeep-maker Stellantis.

The stakes are high for Cutler and Ionna. “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,” Cutler said.

He said the industry has spent years improving EVs themselves — range, performance, and charging speed — while reliable public charging, especially along highways and in urban environments, has remained a stubborn barrier. “We very much feel that if we can do this right, we can enable EV adoption,” Cutler added.

It all comes as Ionna’s attempts to become a contender in the electric-vehicle charging race that Tesla has dominated.

This year, Ionna has more than doubled its charging stations across the US — jumping from 90 active stations in January to 191 at the start of October.

Cutler expects to cut the ribbon on the 200th location this month.

That’s still tiny compared to Tesla, which has more than 3,000 across the US.

Ionna also has to compete with Walmart, which is rapidly building out its EV fast-charging network, with roughly 300 locations under construction outside its stores.

Ionna has focused on pairing its charging stations with amenities.

Several charging sites come with window-cleaning squeegees, trash cans, all-day bathrooms, lounges, and, in some cases, convenience stores with Amazon’s Just Walk Out tech.

JD Power ranked its stations the best fast-charging in the country during its 2026 test.

Still, building out the rest of its charging network will come as automakers pare back their EV offerings amid cooling sales growth.

Next year, one of Ionna’s backers, Honda, won’t have a new vehicle on sale in the US that can plug into the network.

He compared EVs with early flat-screen TVs: initially expensive products with limited appeal that became cheaper and more capable as production scaled globally.

Ionna’s next big bet is that it can help educate the people who will sell them. “I think this idea of whether the future is electric — five, ten years ago, that was an interesting question to ask philosophically,” he said. “I think it’s a foregone conclusion; it’s just a question of that percentage of sales.”