How long does it take to charge an electric car? You hear this one a lot, and there’s only one honest answer: it depends.
Charging time depends on several things at once: battery size, current battery level, charging speed and the car’s charging curve.
One of the biggest factors is charging speed, which is always limited by the lower of the charge point or wallbox’s maximum output and the car’s own capability. Typical limits include: 3.7 kW, 11 kW, 22 kW, 43 kW, 50 kW, 100 kW, 150 kW and 300 kW.
The lower the maximum power, the longer the wait. Or flipped around: the higher the max power, the shorter the stop. No surprises there.
The next factor is the charging curve. Depending on state of charge, a battery can take on a lot of energy quickly. As a rule of thumb: the emptier the battery, the higher the peak speed; the fuller it gets, the lower the speed.
In simple terms, charging slows down as the session goes on, eventually easing back to roughly home-charger pace, around 11 kW.
In practice, charging curves really matter only when rapid charging, and they depend on the car as well as plenty of external factors.
It may sound obvious, but a smaller battery fills faster on a wallbox than a larger one. An older BMW i3 with about 40 kWh will take roughly half the time on an 11 kW wallbox compared with a Tesla Model 3 with nearly double the capacity. On rapid chargers, battery size matters less because cars with bigger batteries often support higher rapid-charge power.
You rarely arrive on 0%. Most drivers top up from around 10–20%. The same goes for 100%: unlike your phone, fully charging an EV isn’t routine, as it can shorten battery life.
So the more you want to add, the longer it will take. Top up little and often in daily use, and each session will be shorter.
