Rivian makes electric trucks and SUVs that are built for off‑road adventures. They’re a newer company compared to older car makers.
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You can push to preserve USMCA as Trump floats bilateral deals. EV registrations did better in October than analysts expected. And Nissan seeks to undercut Tesla with its own self-driving system. Plus, the second and final part of our interview with Iona CEO, Seth Cutler, who says despite the slowdown in new EV sales, the charging problem still needs to be solved.
KBB sales are not going to zero next year. We know there's cars coming off at least, it's going to open up secondary markets here to stay, and we know that we can deliver a great product solution.
Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.
President Trump is signaling he may abandon the USMCA trade agreement in favor of separate deals with Mexico and Canada.
The pact is up for review by July, with Trump saying it could expire or be renegotiated. Automakers and suppliers are pushing back hard.
They warn that splitting the agreement would cost billions and force them to completely overhaul supply chains.
The industry has optimized manufacturing around USMCA's three country framework since it replaced NAFTA.
There is one exception. The UAW wants major changes or US withdrawal demanding stronger job protections and labor standards.
Industry experts say companies should prepare for all scenarios.
EV registrations fell 14% in October, the first month after the federal tax credit repeal, but the decline was milder than analysts expected.
Tesla led the way with an 11% gain compared with a year earlier. To nearly 50,000 registrations, Rivian rose 10%.
Traditional automaker struggled, Ford registrations dropped 23% from October 2024, Chevrolet fell 31%, and Hyundai and Kia slid 49% and 56% respectively.
According to S&P Global Mobility Data, the EV share of the light vehicle market fell to 6.9% in October from 7.6% a year earlier.
S&P analysts Tom Libby says the results point to a solid EV consumer base, though the market still faces uncertainty ahead.
Nissan is making its boldest move yet to challenge Tesla in autonomous driving. The Japanese automakers developing a hands-off, eyes-on system modeled after Tesla's full self-driving with no geographic restrictions.
Nissan expects the first vehicles with its AI-powered next-generation pro-pilot system to initially arrive in Japan and North America.
Joining me now to talk about it is our own Irvash Kakaria who covered the story for us at Automotive News. Irvash, welcome back to Daily Drive.
Who'd like to be back yet?
So Irvash, how is this similar or different from Tesla?
Yeah, so Nissan's taking a very similar approach to Tesla both in what they're trying to achieve and how they get there.
So like Tesla, Nissan is trying to develop an end-to-end point autonomous driving system.
So it would basically get you from your garage, your residential garage, your home garage, to your office garage. It would drive the full way.
That's different from, say, super cruise or blue cruise from GM and Ford, which are primarily used for highway driving. It's ramp-to-ramp.
Like Tesla, like Tesla's FSD, Nissan's next-generation pro-pilot system will sort of do the whole thing.
Nissan is also following Tesla's strategy on how to get there.
So Nissan plans to use at least initially cameras and a vision-based system as opposed to LiDAR.
There are two reasons for that. One is it's a lot less expensive, which is what Nissan's priority is.
Nissan has said that its next-generation pro-pilot system should be commercialized initially in Japan
by early 2028 and they expect it to be about half the cost of Tesla's FSD, which is $8,000 if you buy it upfront.
So this would be a $4,000 system. To get there, they're doing two things. One, they're trying to get less expensive hardware, i.e. cameras versus LiDARs, which are more advanced.
But they're also essentially partnering with a British company called Wave.
Wave has developed this artificial intelligence sort of driving platform, which essentially taps into a neural network or basically a network of other cars that are also feeding information on how they are navigating day-to-day.
So instead of having rigid rules and millions of lines of code, Wave's AI platform essentially is able to learn how to drive faster and also adapt towards more edge cases.
So it's really a more efficient, less cost and labor-intensive way of solving the autonomous driving challenge.
So Irvash, Nissan is in a tough financial situation right now. How does that affect this really ambitious plan?
Absolutely. So, I mean, for Nissan self-driving is not a priority. They have much bigger fish to fry.
For them coming up with a coherent plan for hybrid hybrids in the US is far more important.
They're also developed spending billions of dollars in developing this new body on frame platform that will support up to five vehicles.
So, you know, cutting costs, they're in the middle of a $2 billion cost-cutting austerity plan in North America.
So, cutting costs bringing new, more competitive product of market, those are the priorities.
But what Nissan says is, we're working on all that, but at the same time, we also need to solve the economy challenge.
You know, several automakers are pushing towards this goal. It's basically going to be a $3 trillion business.
And for companies like Nissan, self-driving is more about safety and it's also more about driver convenience.
So, anybody who's sort of driven Tesla's FSD will say that it's a lot safer than human driving.
Like, it can detect edge cases, it can react faster than humans.
So, it's, for most intense and purposes, it's safer than a human driver. Yes, there are edge cases.
And then also, even though you have to still, you know, pay attention, still look ahead, it creates a lot less fatigue than if you were actually physically driving the car.
So, driver comfort is another reason Nissan and other automakers are pushing for this technology.
Awesome. Urbosh, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you.
And those are today's headlines. You can find more details on all those stories at autonews.com.
Coming up, the second and final part of our interview with Ayanna C.E.O. Seth Cutler.
That's next on Daily Drive.
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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellen Walker.
On yesterday's show, we heard the first part of our own Lindsay Van Hulley's interview with Ayanna C.E.O. Seth Cutler
about the charging networks of build out with the backing of eight major automakers.
In this final portion of the interview, they talk about how Cutler is thinking about the company's target market as EV demand softens after the loss of the federal EV tax credit.
And why the network is opting not to develop its own charging app.
All of the chargers, I believe you said, are 400 kilowatts.
And depending on the size, they range from somewhere around 8 to 14 up to more than 20.
And so the idea, what I gathered today is that that's really about making sure that there's enough stations that as many of them can be pulled through for vehicles that might be telling, trying to make it so that people don't have to wait and that there's enough available for really that demand for those people who are on the road.
It's all about availability in terms of if it's going to go down.
We hear people talking in the industry of our stuff never breaks, things break, it happens.
So we want to make sure we've got redundancy built in there.
So it gives us a day or two for us to get on site and fix things.
But really important beyond that is really around how do we make sure that during peak times of utilization, you don't have queuing.
We wrote you all the time, we were two EV family, we have a Tesla, we have a BMW, we just took our Tesla in New York City, charging is really difficult in New York City.
And we sat in queuing in New York City for like 30 minutes or two small kids in the car, it's challenging.
So you want to make sure you're building larger format locations where possible.
It's not always easy, but you do that in a way to bring queuing down even at peak utilization times.
And you've done this in a couple of ways, right?
You're actually, it sounds like purchasing plots or leasing plots.
And you're also buying old gas stations, for instance, and converting them or even co-locating, I think, with existing gas stations.
That's right. So again, you know, because we could take a driver first mentality, it drives different behaviors, which is hey, if our outcome we're trying to achieve is larger formats locations with great customer experience, how do we solve that?
Well, hey, one of the ways we can solve that is by just buying our own land, cool, go buy land, right?
We know of our locations. We've bought land or done on groundless of a piece of land, but we only built on half of it to get through power faster or permitting faster, knowing as we build out utilization or utilization of to fill the site.
We'll open the second half of the site or feature proof location.
So, you know, we've got a lot of tools in our tool chest, so to speak, that others haven't done before, just because the ethos, the DNA, the way we think about the customers is totally different.
And it shows in every way that we build our products.
So what cases doesn't make sense, you know, to partner with an existing, like a sheet's gas station, for instance, versus actually buying or leasing a plot of land and then building from scratch.
I think the way you described it today was if you have the land yourself, you have a lot more ability to kind of design it and build it the way that you would build it today from the ground up versus, you know, kind of coming into an existing facility that might already have building constraints or things like that.
There's advantages to probably speed. I'm guessing you can get at me a little bit faster.
For sure. I mean, Aaron talked today, he was our head of our site exhibition, our partnerships and a lot of parts of the business.
So you can talk today about how, you know, sometimes we can go fast by buying land for sure than we can by leasing a parking space.
But from a permitting standpoint, it takes longer when you want to do a larger format location and you got to go through a planning commission zoning and set reverses, you're partnering with somebody, the secondary use in that parking lot.
So we know from a speed standpoint now that the fastest way to market is to do it with partners, but we want to look for high quality partners.
This is why we partner with folks like Sheets and Wawa and Casey's and others because they've got great locations, they've got great amenities, they've got a great customer base, and we want to help them with our charging fees.
So we'll do that. We're possible. And then where we can and we can kind of fill in the valley, so to speak from a time element to get the scale, we'll go in and build our fully charged as well to complement.
Because it's really is an overall tapestry of different solutions that will put into different cities. So customers will see, and any given see we build in, they'll see a mix of different solutions from IANA.
You're doing all of this, obviously, and there's, it's well known charging access and availability has been one of the challenges.
The markets also shifted a bit, right? But you know, we had up until the end of September, we had text credits, there were incentives that helped, you know, kind of offset some of the higher EV prices.
That's gone away. And so now we're, I think the industry is sort of waiting to see what that demand ultimately settles out to be.
How do you think about the importance of building out that charger network? You know, one hand, demand is less right now as far as the, you know, new EV purchases go, but people also pointed out, at some point, there's going to be a lot of off lease EVs that go back into the used market.
And, you know, how do you kind of think about building it out right now, knowing that there's a lot of influx in the market at this point and where that ultimately goes?
Yeah, it's interesting because I've been in this space for, I think, 15 years now, it just shows how old I'm getting.
The thing is, like, if you look back 10 years ago, folks were building out charging networks betting on the company or betting that cars were going to get sold, betting the technology was going to be there.
The best part about it on it, and look, we have the advantage of not being the first, right? But being maybe the third or second or third, is that there are cars already.
There are great cars in the road right now in market and coming out next year and the year after that have long range, have fast charge rates that are really fantastic vehicles that people want to drive.
And so we have a charging issue right now in the United States, that's going to be solved, and we're solving that.
We know EV sales are not going to zero next year. We know there's cars coming off lease that's going to open up secondary markets.
And so I think all of that coupled together is it doesn't matter what the growth rate is next year, or even if it goes down a little bit.
We know for sure that this markets here to stay, and we know that we can deliver a great product solution today.
And I think what we would add to that also is people have built out charging networks already, and people can rely on charging.
But not every charger people go to or places people want to be yet, right?
And I think that's what we're trying to make sure of is that what we can also do is help build out a quality network that takes away the doubt and folks when they're looking at an EV saying, I don't know, I'll buy an EV because there's an eye on a network coupled with the OEMs.
It makes sense to go do this now.
There were a couple of percent of this year today about success of first time charge at the first charger attempts as well as total up time.
What are those? And how do you look at those in kind of context of where you want to be?
And is that a sign that reliability is where you wanted at this point?
Yeah, so, you know, I think definitely a lot of numbers are not today both on big counts and everything else.
I'll try and remember every number that we put out there.
But I think that the big thing for us is we look at two important quality metrics for charging today.
One is uptime, and the other one is, as you've heard today, first time success.
You know, from an uptime perspective, we really do look at it differently today.
And I think in the world of EV in the last few years, it's a concept of nevy uptime, et cetera.
We look at uptime actually different than nevy from the perspective of if an asset isn't performing to a customer way, it should be, we put it down and we affect it uptime.
So what we don't want to ever do is have a customer show up to a site that we say is up that they don't get the experience you're looking for.
And we had one yesterday, in fact, where someone posted, hey, the credit career isn't working.
If you missed it in our diagnostics, it happens.
We're doing an after-action review to understand why we weren't alerted first.
We took that charger offline within 30 seconds of seeing it coming to our system.
A truck was rolling on site within six hours.
They replaced the credit creator, the charger's back online.
So at that type of mentality that we're trying to drive into the organization to ensure that, again, it's about building trust with our brand.
So when someone here's a word Iana, what they think about it works.
I don't know the worry about it.
And that's a totally different approach.
I think that's what's been in the market before.
And you kind of look at this through a whole diagnostics team then that can alert when these things happen.
You have crews that are near all of these chargers, whether employees or contractors who can then go out and make those repairs.
Exactly.
And it's really, you know, you think about it.
It's really around, how do we get alerted?
How do we monitor how we alert and then diagnose and then how we fix?
We've built our own a learning platform proprietary through our company that pulls in a lot of different disparate pieces of data.
Not just from the charger, but other other assets that are on site and even working with the car companies understand what's going on.
And we use that to alert us and actually start to tell us what might be going on versus us trying to go through logs.
And as I call it read the matrix, understand what to go do.
And so we use it to quickly make decisions.
And then we always advise towards action.
So what we're typically dispatching crews on site prior to knowing what to go dispatched parts with.
And we'll try to, what we call it, kind of set a medkit of parts out there that they can pick out which one.
Because in the day, our operations team is focused on get the charger up and running as fast as possible.
That's how they're measured.
That's what they're working towards.
And it drives a different behavior because of that.
You talked a lot today about, but I on a speed.
Yeah.
And there's obviously the speed to get those chargers back up and running.
There's also the speed to deploy them and install them.
And I think some of the automakers today talked about, you know, we push Seth.
We push on, we want them to go fast.
And they push us to go fast on the technology side because they have those automakers as investors.
There's a lot I'm guessing of that kind of dialogue.
I don't believe the investment amount has been shared, but I understand that all of the automakers are equal partners in the company.
Yeah.
How do you, I guess, take that feedback, you know, when you have those kinds of discussions and others, there's a board that meets periodically.
What are those, those conversations like it sounds very collaborative?
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's collaborative.
I think, I think there's, there's healthy friction in terms of, you know, for sure.
The only ones are pushing us.
How much faster can you go?
How can you get these chargers running up and running faster?
Can you get more sites?
We're pushing on them as well.
Say, how do we get more integrated into your dealerships?
How do we make sure we're working with you and your customers and the integration technology side?
So I think this is the healthy friction you need.
Heat really forms things.
And that's what we're doing together.
And I think you heard today about, you know, the collaboration has been really successful to date.
You know, someone said, hey, they would have thought.
And I've heard this before in the past.
You know, eight car companies coming together to run a startup.
Nobody would have thought that I, Anna, could have done what they did.
And then really that's the testament to the people on the board from the OEMs that they provided.
It's a testament, not to me, but the team and the coach that we built here in terms of the folks here are mission driven.
Right.
And so really it becomes a collaboration of working with the car company and say, here's the support that we need.
Right.
And then us saying, we're going to execute now.
And that's what you're seeing as a result of that.
And obviously the resources of their investment have obviously helped.
I, Anna, get up and run it and start it.
Yeah.
When you look at how you're deploying some of these stations, you talked a lot about efficiency and trying to run lane.
There's obviously a path to profitability that takes time.
I'm guessing you're still new.
How do you know when you, I guess when you get to that point, it sounds like there's a road map to that.
You see, you see a path to profitability.
Absolutely.
You know, from early on when we built this company, three things that mattered to me.
One was how do we get the profitability when we started to staff up?
Two was how do you, how do you ensure quality at scale?
And the third one was how do you go fast?
Right.
Those are really kind of the three things that we've been focused on.
And I think a lot of that comes down to just being very intentional and deliberate.
Everything that we invest time and money on and being laser focused.
And so there's definitely a path that we're working towards on profitability.
It does take time, but it's definitely core to what we're trying to build here.
When you look at that, what are the kind of the things that you do when you focus on efficiency?
You try to be lean?
How does that approach kind of guide the overall idea and launch and deployment of these stations?
Yeah, I mean, I think I think a lot of it is it's easy to get what we call the shiny object syndrome.
Everybody wants to work on different things.
It's just human nature.
There was a discussion today around, hey, why doesn't I have an app?
And it kind of shook people both internally and externally around how could you launch a charge network without a mobile app?
And it would have been easy to kind of start the company and say, all right, first thing we do is develop an app.
Because that's what you do, right?
And I think when we say, no, no, we're not doing that.
And sometimes the power to say, no, is way more powerful than the power to say, yes.
And so we've been really focused on, is it going to benefit the driver?
And is it going to deliver quality of scale?
If it's not going to do that, don't work on it.
And that's a hard thing for people to digest.
But honestly, that's why we've been able to do what we've been able to do.
There's only like, I think we're up to 85 people that work here, right?
And you think about 4,000 base contract to think about 3,000 base and permitting.
I think about 1,200 base would be on the construction in 22 months, right?
This office, we opened in January of this year.
This office didn't exist.
We started this company out of a temporary office in Torrance.
Then we moved to temporary office in Raleigh.
And now we're here.
I mean, these are the things that we're going on, literally building the cars, they say,
while you're trying to drive it.
So it's only possible if you're very deliberate in how you run the organization.
There are ways to do that, obviously, in demand, in pricing, and how you get people in.
But there's also, you know, and I think you kind of pointed this out in from kind of a long term perspective.
You have land that you've acquired or at least you haven't fully built out on.
And you sort of hinted that there might be things coming down the line where we can maybe lease it to a retail provider.
Or there's ways that we can generate revenue from this land.
You know, it's from almost like a real estate kind of thing.
And I wonder how you think about that long term is that path isn't just about the charging sessions and the customers
and the prices that you said and things like that.
But there are other ways that you're looking at this down down the road.
Yeah, look, from early on, when we started the company, when we brought some of the key folks that you met today, you know,
there was very much an intentional desire to want to own land of 100%.
And I think this is really a real estate play than the day, honestly.
This is about how do you make sure that you can deliver quality charges like we talked about and then drive traffic to particular locations.
And if you do that, the value becomes the location themselves, well, then anything else.
And so that's why right now it's like we kind of know we have a longer time horizon on this way strategy multigenerionally of what it is we want to accomplish and achieve.
But we know that in order to get there, there's certain things have to be true first.
And so we're in the, we know it has to be true first is we have to get our first thousand days open to the public so we can actually deliver quality scale.
And then we have to deepen the technological integration in the OEMs and talk about the discount and other things that are going to happen.
And then what's right on beyond that horizon is I think there's something else here in terms of the business model.
And how we really monetize this platform that we're really starting to build on.
And that sounds longer than that 2030 initial horizon.
Absolutely. I mean, look, as the CEO, like, you can imagine day one, I'll try to figure out how to pay payroll and set up a website.
I mean, there's a lot of funny stories in there. But like every, every month right or every year that we move to the next wave of our strategy.
I'm moving up an elevation in terms of what we're thinking about for both for sure the first like probably the first week that I was that I was here.
It was kind of like, hey, what's our tenure vision? We know the five year vision is 30,000. What comes after that?
We've got some ideas of what that looks like, honestly, and we're working towards that.
But really, what you got to make sure is you can spend the entire time thinking about 10 years out.
A lot of companies do that. You got to think about what's the here and now and be very deliberate on how to drive execution.
You know, to that end, I guess, you know, you've talked about 26 being kind of the next wave.
There were some stay tuned discussions today about things that might be coming.
But what can you tell us, I guess, about just what might be next in that kind of near term horizon then?
As you're working on building up a network and deepening that technology, adding new things,
like the plug and charge technology that people were talking about, what does come next?
And what kinds of things do you hope to be able to roll out or bring new?
Yeah, I mean, for us, that's why I was so important to get the first part of the network scale this year.
What we call the skeletal structure of end of the year.
And by doing that, it gives you this initial base platform to build upon from a technical integration standpoint.
Sure, we've got plug and charge with, I think it's seven OEMs today going to nine by end of next year,
maybe even earlier than that, which is a really impressive stat and you think about a company that's been out for 22 months.
And sure we've got integration with several different mobile apps, not just the OEMs, but also with, you know, roaming partners, etc.
But there's deeper technical integration you can start to do to provide additional benefits to drivers,
whether it's discounts or programs or other things that we're looking at right now that will be announced next year.
And I think as we then build out more scale and build out more of the network and finish our phase one build the end of next year,
which will only be less than three years at that point, then you can start to do a lot more of the OEMs in terms of being able to revive an unnetwork that they can rely on and trust.
And this is open even beyond just, you know, there's the eight Founding OEMs, but really you've designed it to be open to any EV driver from any brand.
It's 100%. And, you know, I'm really proud of what the team has done, right, that we were able to announce with Ford back, I think it's been two weeks now,
we announced plug-and-charge with Ford, we announced with Rivian plug-and-charge and integrations or head units about about a month ago.
So the eight for sure is a very deep technical integration, but this is an open network for all drivers.
We're trying to solve charging in North America and that goes way beyond just the eight investors.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
That's daily drive for today, I'm Kellyn Walker.
Thanks to automotive news executive producer Jake Near, as well as our own John Erwin, Lauren Seiliff and Ervosh Kakaria for their reporting for today's podcast.
You can get the latest news on electrification, tariffs and trade, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.
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About this episode
Seth Cutler, CEO of Ionna, discusses the challenges and strategies in expanding EV charging networks amid fluctuating demand. He emphasizes the importance of reliability and accessibility in charging stations, especially as the market adjusts after the federal EV tax credit repeal. The conversation also touches on Nissan's ambitious plans to compete with Tesla in autonomous driving and the implications of potential changes to the USMCA trade agreement. Insights into the collaboration between automakers and Ionna highlight the industry's push for innovation and efficiency in EV infrastructure.
In this second and final part of Automotive News’ interview with Seth Cutler, the Ionna CEO discusses softening electric vehicle demand after the loss of the federal tax credit and why the company is opting not to develop its own charging app. Automakers push to preserve USMCA as President Donald Trump floats bilateral deals. Plus, EV registrations do better in October than analysts expected.
