Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess has taken to social media to share his frustration about using an Ionity charging station during a recent road trip.
Diess is currently enjoying a summer holiday and was on a road trip through the Brenner Pass in Austria in an ID.3. There are four Ionity charging points along the Brenner Pass but Diess said that one of them wasn’t working and the other three were in use. As such, he decided to drive to Trento, Italy to locate a charging station but he wasn’t very happy with what he found.
“No bathroom, no coffee, an out-of-service/broken charging point, a sad state of affairs,” he wrote in LinkedIn. “It was anything but a premium charging experience, IONITY!”
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Ionity was established as a joint venture between BMW, Daimler, Ford, and Volkswagen a few years ago and in late 2020, Hyundai joined the partnership. There are hundreds of fast-charging stations across the Ionity network in Europe but VW’s boss found that the experience provided by the company is far from seamless.
As Bloomberg notes, this isn’t the first time VW Group has criticized Ionity. Last year, head of marketing at the VW brand, Silke Bagschick, said Ionity’s charging prices were too high. Audi boss Markus Duesmann has also said the German automaker is considering establishing its own charging infrastructure in big cities throughout Europe.
Jalopnik reached out to Ionity for a comment on Diess’ complaints. “We cannot comment on your request with a statement on our part and hope for your understanding,” the company responded.
