FAQ

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Hyundai

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BMW Jaguar

Renault

Nissan says charging its Leaf from zero to full can take up to 24 hours using the standard power at your house, but if you invest in a special 7kW home charger the recharge time drops to around 7.5hrs. If you use a rapid charger, you can top up the battery from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in around an hour. But we’ll come back to charger types in a moment. 

Then there’s Tesla; the brand that made EVs cool measures its charge time on a distance-per-hour scale. So for the Model 3, you’ll get around 48km in range for every hour of charging that your car is plugged in at home. A Tesla Wall Box or an on-the-road Supercharger will significantly reduce that time, of course.

Enter Jaguar, with its i-Pace SUV. The British brand (the first of the traditional premium marques to get an EV to marker) claims an 11km per hour recharge rating using home power. The bad news? That roughly equals 43 hours for a full charge, which seems staggeringly impractical. Installing a special home charger (which most owners will) increases that rate to 35km of range per hour.

Finally, we’ll look at Hyundai’s just-launched Kona Electric. The brand says from empty to 80 per cent of charge takes nine hours and 35 minutes, using a home wall unit, or 75 minutes using a fast-charging station. Plugged into the mains at home? That’ll be 28 hours for a full charge of the battery pack.

Average electricity costs for at-home electric car charging in Australia

Average cost of public electric car charging in Australia

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You’ll see two key plug types in use in Australia: CCS and ChaDeMo.

Put simply, CCS combines the AC and DC charging inputs into one plug, while ChaDeMo is DC-only and requires a secondary AC charge point.

Both are in use – the Nissan Leaf, for example uses ChaDeMo while the Jaguar I-Pace is CCS – but it’s likely only one will prevail as the industry progresses.

“It appears as if CCS is probably going to be what we’ll see dominate the industry in Australia,” Dr Finn says

You'll also see references to Type 1 and Type 2 – these are different types of AC sockets.

"Type 1 and Type 2 refer to the AC part of the charging socket – Type 1 has single-phase capacity, Type 2 has three-phase capacity," Dr Finn explains.

"Three-phase, which allows you to get a lot more current, is a lot more prevalent in Europe."

Australia utilises both Type 1 and Type 2, depending on the vehicle.