Two questions, answered per car: how long does it take, and what does it cost. The figures come from the same sourced database as the rest of this site, the tariffs are the same ones the running-cost calculator uses, and every assumption is printed on the page rather than buried in a script.
Charging and cost by car
- Tesla Model Y — 27 min on DC, about $5.06 per 100 miles
- Tesla Model 3 — 28 min on DC, about $4.86 per 100 miles
- Hyundai Ioniq 5 — 18 min on DC, about $5.52 per 100 miles
- Hyundai Ioniq 6 — 17 min on DC, about $4.78 per 100 miles
- Kia EV6 — 17 min on DC, about $5.45 per 100 miles
- Kia EV9 — 22 min on DC, about $7.36 per 100 miles
- Volkswagen ID.4 — 28 min on DC, about $5.48 per 100 miles
- Ford Mustang Mach-E — 32 min on DC, about $5.65 per 100 miles
- BMW i4 eDrive40 — 28 min on DC, about $5.24 per 100 miles
- Porsche Taycan — 19 min on DC, about $6.83 per 100 miles
- Nissan Ariya — 48 min on DC, about $6.73 per 100 miles
- Volvo EX30 — 28 min on DC, about $5.37 per 100 miles
- Toyota bZ4X — 28 min on DC, about $5.15 per 100 miles
- BYD Seal — 36 min on DC, about €4.86 per 100 km (not sold in the US, so priced in euros)
- Volkswagen ID.7 — 27 min on DC, about €4.26 per 100 km (Europe only, priced in euros)
The concepts behind these numbers — why the peak kW figure misleads, what winter actually costs, why two official range figures exist — are explained in the guides, and the cars are sorted on each measure in the rankings.
Two pieces of arithmetic most pages get wrong
A full charge costs more than the battery holds. Usable capacity is measured at the battery, but you pay for what comes out of the wall, and charging is roughly 90 per cent efficient. A 75 kWh pack draws about 83 kWh to fill. Pages that multiply capacity by tariff understate the bill by about a tenth.
But cost per mile needs no such adjustment. The EPA’s kWh per 100 miles figure is already measured at the wall, so applying the same correction twice would overstate it. We use capacity for the full-charge figure and the EPA rating for the per-mile figure, which is why the two are calculated differently on every page here.
Three of these cars cost more than petrol on public chargers
“Electric is cheaper to run” is a statement about home charging, and it stops being true at the top of the consumption range. At $0.48/kWh the Porsche Taycan costs $17.81 per 100 miles and the Nissan Ariya $17.57 and the Kia EV9 $19.20, against $15.07 for a 27 mpg petrol car at $4.07 a gallon. The Mustang Mach-E Standard Range lands exactly on the petrol figure.
All three are still far cheaper than petrol at the home rate — $6.83, $6.73 and $7.36 per 100 miles, and how the two fuels compare over a year takes the same arithmetic out to purchase price and depreciation. The whole answer turns on where you plug in, which is why every page here prints both rates instead of averaging them into one reassuring figure.
The same numbers, across every car
Five pieces put the per-car pages side by side: how many stops a 500-mile drive takes and how long they cost in each car, what charging costs per month for every EPA-rated car at US rates, what that month costs in each US state, 7.7 kW against 11.5 kW at home for all eighteen with a sourced onboard charger, and how many kWh a full charge takes from the wall.
Why a faster charger does not always mean a faster charge
Each page shows the time at 50, 150 and 350 kW, and the tables make something clear that specification sheets hide: past a point, the station stops being the constraint and the car’s own charging curve takes over. How many of those stations exist in the first place, and how many have only one plug, is counted in 77,268 public fast-charging plugs.
A Tesla Model Y reaches its 27-minute figure on a 150 kW station — a 350 kW one gains it nothing. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 needs the full 350 kW to reach its 18 minutes, and takes 22 on a 150. So the same upgrade in charger power helps one car and not the other, and neither manufacturer tells you which. Five of the fifteen cars worked out here get anything at all from a 350 kW post, and all five run 800-volt packs; the other ten reach their own limit at 150 kW.
The whole field ranked on that window is on fastest-charging electric cars, why the peak kW figure misleads is explained in what a 10-80% charge time tells you, and the car-by-car answer to whether the expensive charger is worth queueing for is in do you need a 350 kW charger.