@FalconFour makes sense - appreciate the info about the differences in charging architecture. Perhaps Tesla will "catch up" and move to the higher-voltage architecture in the future.
@lynyrdM yes, apologies, meant to use kW as the charging rate. Also appreciate the insights about weather conditions and pre-conditioning. In fact, I tried charging again later in the day (today) and got 68kW at 70% SoC by pre-conditioning for about 5-10 minutes prior to my arrival to another 150kW EA station (and perhaps there may have been other factors involved being a different EA station). Interesting to hear about the inconsistent charging behavior on the Ionic 5.
@smatthew can you further explain the comment about the "150kW" and "350kW"? The Ionic 5 and I were both charging at the same time today at the EA station, and both were rated at 150kW. I'll need to look for a 350kW EA station sometime soon though...
The confusing thing for EA and others is a lack of consistency with their amperage ratings. Some 350kW stations only output 350 Amps (BTCPower, software limited ABB stations) while others output 500 Amps (New Signet units, unlocked ABB units). So just because a station says 350kW doesn’t mean it will actually be faster than the 150kW unit next to it for our 400V cars since they may both only deliver 350 amps.
350kW stations can only reach that type
of speed with higher voltage. So if the station is 350 Amp like the BTCPower stations tend to be then 350,000 Watts / 350 Amps = 1000 Volts are required to reach that 350kW speed. This is what makes calling those 350 Amp stations “350kW” kind of misleading to me since there isn’t a car out there that hits 1000V on its pack.
It’s much easier on a 500 Amp station to hit 350kW and I believe the Hummer EV actually does. So if we do the same math 350,000 Watts / 500 Amps = 700 Volts. That’s much more realistic since many cars are starting to have that type of voltage in their packs (Hummer EV, Ioniq 5, Taycan, E-Tron GT).
For the Model 3/Y, the voltage tends to go from 360V at a low SOC to around 400V at a high SOC. So on a 350 amp charger under ideal conditions, we’d see somewhere between 126kW to 137kW depending on pack voltage and charge curve.
For a 500A charger you do the same math at the charging peak and see that 385V * 500 Amps = 192,000 Watts is about the max we will see.
The new generation S/X can go faster since their pack voltage is about 50V higher. Using the same Power (Watts) = Voltage (V) * Current (Amps) equation you can see that nets them out another 17-25kW over the 3/Y.
When you want to know how fast you can charge, look at the Amps instead of the nameplate kW rating. The nameplate power rating is sort of a maximum that no one will achieve (usually) but you can see what’s possible by doing the math yourself (multiply 385V by the max amps of the charger).
So as another expample, there are a lot of “125kW” Chargepoint chargers in Colorado. If I wanted to use one I wouldn’t get anything close to 125kW. That’s because the chargers only output 200 Amps. What I will actually get is around 385V * 200A = 77,000W which is basically urban Supercharger speed.