Actually Electrify America can charge at 350 kW. They have to actively cool the cables to keep them from overheating.
> in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW.
I think with v3 Superchargers, this is no longer true. There is a megawatt allocated per 4 chargers. I'm not sure how much this applies to the really big stations, because it seems they could be using multiple megawatts of power.
So just naive application of already-deployed technology can get you to ~500 kW. You don't think someone's going to squeeze out a thicker cable, really? No, this is doable. The real limit is how much current the battery can sink without degradation at the top end of the charge curve. The electrical stuff is kinda trivial.
Coming up with batteries that charge quickly is a different matter. Batteries are getting better, but it seems that part of the solution so far is to just have batteries that are so big that they don't need to be charged very often. Charging a 30kwh battery in an hour only gets you half the range in the same time as charging a 60kwh battery in an hour.
Maybe if we keep increasing the power of the chargers, we'll eventually ditch the cables and move to something like parking a car over a pair of big copper plates that extend to make contact with a matching pair of copper plates on the bottom of the car. I could also see some kind of system where the car has a fixture for attaching a coolant hose, and the charger pumps cold water through the battery while it's charging.
At some level, though, I think this is a trying to engineer around a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If we had electrified roads that are capable of charging vehicles while they're moving, then battery sizes and charge times would be less of an issue, and we wouldn't need to have cars that devote a quarter of their mass or so to batteries. It would only really need to be on major roads, and probably only in short sections at regular intervals.
Chargers substantailly bigger than that are definitely in or past the planning phase, for example: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-po...
4.5MW systems are being planned
https://cleancities.energy.gov/files/u/news_events/document/...
With current battery tech we'd probably need a 600 mile pack to make those charging speeds feasible for 300 miles in 10 minutes. That's a big pack, but again, just a bit of an engineering challenge, not revolutionary.
Though I otherwise agree, home charging is where it's at. Starting every day with a full charge and never going to the gas station is really nice. I hope we can quickly scale up the infrastructure so everyone can enjoy it. Right now maybe 50% of the US population is able to easily charge at home.
I'm surprisingly ignorant on this. ICE engine is fast-recharge as baseline; feels like batteries will forever have slow charge as baseline, fast charge as emergency occasional compromise that you know is killing your durability. This is where hydrogen seemed an exciting alternative. Am I wrong?
Jury's still out on that. Some manufacturers (GM comes to mind) are claiming their next generation batteries won't degrade from constant fast-charging.
Charging at home can happen. But this will be a hassle for a lot of people.
I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase.
Having said all of the above - the 250kW charging as-is is already stupidly fast as "good enough". And charging at home will always be king even at slower speeds.