How much would you pay to save 5 minutes: Why we think faster charging is overrated

Geely started installing its 2.25 MW chargers in five Chinese cities last week. Each cabinet can serve two cars at more than 1 MW each, and Geely’s fastest models peak at about 1.1 MW. On 30 September the company was in Raunheim, looking for German partners to build 1 000 kW stations. It gave no timeline and didn’t name a car sold in Europe that could use one. BYD has 11 586 flash charging stations in China and has promised 3 000 in Europe. In the US, EVgo pushed its 750 kW system to 2027.

It’s impressive engineering. We still think it’s overrated, at least for cars in Europe. A fast-charging stop isn’t a fuel stop. People plug in and walk off, and the car is usually done before they’re back. And a megawatt is expensive, mostly because of what it takes from the grid.

That leaves a simple question. How much would you pay to save 5 minutes? We tried to put a number on it.

Today’s chargers are already faster than the cars

We looked at 15.4 million sessions on chargers of 150 kW and more in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, from August to the start of October. The average car was on the plug for 27 minutes. On 400–700 kW chargers it was 24.5 minutes. On 150–249 kW chargers it was 27.9.

So a charger with more than twice the power saves about 3 minutes, and in Norway and Sweden it saves nothing. The limit is the car. Most batteries cut their charging power well before 80% to protect themselves, and a bigger charger can’t change that. We saw the same thing in June from a different angle: doubling the power per bay shortened sessions by 0 to 13%.

Fastned sells 26.9 kWh per session on average, and IONITY says 30 kWh. Spread over 27 minutes, that’s 59 to 66 kW, on chargers with an average rating of 269 kW. That’s our calculation, using their averages and our measured time, but Kempower’s own data lands in the same place: an average of 52.9 kW per session in the UK. The fast chargers Europe already has deliver about a quarter of what they’re rated for.

What a faster battery buys

To see where the time goes, we modelled a car with 90 kWh usable charging from 20 to 80%, with four different charging curves: a typical car today, the best car today, a car that holds 150 kW all the way, and a megawatt car with a 12C battery.

Moving a typical car from a 150 kW to a 350 kW charger saves less than a minute. A car that simply held 150 kW up to 80% would save another three minutes, on any charger that’s already in the ground. In our model, the best cars on sale in Europe today do 20 to 80% in about 18 minutes on a 350 kW charger. The German motoring club ADAC has tested two of the newest, the BMW iX3 and the Mercedes CLA. Both peaked at 296 kW on ADAC’s 300 kW test charger. The iX3 took 25 minutes from 10 to 80%, and the CLA averaged 169 kW over the whole charge.

The megawatt car does it in under six minutes on a 1 MW charger. On a 350 kW charger it takes about ten. So most of the gain comes from the battery. The megawatt charger itself adds 4.4 minutes, and only for cars that can take a megawatt, which today means a handful of Chinese models.

Drivers don’t wait by the car

When you fill up with petrol, you stand next to the car for five minutes. At a fast charger you plug in and leave: toilet, coffee, something to eat. Time saved at the charger only counts if you’d otherwise be standing there waiting.

Portugal’s national charging platform logs every status change, so we can see how long people actually stay. On chargers of 150 kW and more, the median stop this summer was 30 minutes, and half of all stops lasted between 20 and 45 minutes. About one in ten was ten minutes or less. Today’s charging speeds shape those numbers, so they don’t tell us what drivers would do with a faster car. They do show that most people already use the time for something else.

For a megawatt car, the advantage over a 350 kW charger is gone once the driver is away for more than about 11 minutes. Both chargers finish before the driver is back. ChargePoint’s CEO said much the same in August: forecourts are built for stops of 10 to 15 minutes, and most drivers won’t notice the difference between nine and eleven. Fastned says it designs its stations so that a 15-minute charge feels like a welcome break.

Trucks have this written into law: a 45-minute break after four and a half hours of driving, and the megawatt charging standard is sized to fill a truck battery inside that break. Cars don’t have a rule like that. Their drivers still need the toilet.

Most of a megawatt is grid connection

Per kW, megawatt hardware isn’t much more expensive than what’s on the market today. The ICCT’s cost survey found hardware getting slightly cheaper per kW from 50 to 350 kW, and Fraunhofer ISI puts megawatt hardware at €337 to €460 per kW, about the same as a 350 kW charger. The problem is volume. A megawatt bay has more than three times the kW of a 300 kW bay, so it costs roughly three times as much, while the car decides how much energy it takes. You pay for three times the power and sell the same kilowatt-hours.

Most of the extra money goes into the grid. Above a few hundred kW, a site leaves the low-voltage grid, needs its own transformer and pays a connection fee: €154 to €209 per kW at medium voltage in the German price sheets we checked. Northeim on the A7 shows the scale. Doubling the truck stop’s connection from 9 to 18 MW takes an 80-tonne switching station and about €1 million, before a single charger is installed. That upgrade is for trucks, which is where a megawatt per bay makes sense.

Then you pay for the capacity every year, whether you use it or not. In the UK, standing charges make up about 30p of a typical 76p per kWh ultra-rapid price, and ChargeUK says operators pay them “based on future capacity, not current utilisation”. In Sweden, Ellevio tripled the yearly grid fee for a small fast-charging site on Orust, and the regulator backed it: “it is peak power that drives grid costs.” Germany’s grid-fee reform, due from 2029, works the same way. You book capacity in advance, and power above the booking is billed at two to three and a half times the normal rate.

And there’s a queue. “The grid is full,” Johannes Pallasch, head of Germany’s national charging infrastructure office, told the transport ministry’s charging conference last week. The charging industry association says new allocation rules at grid operators add one and a half to two years to a project. Half of the 200 Deutschlandnetz sites on the Autobahn are open, and the rest are late, partly because medium-voltage connections didn’t arrive in time. In the Netherlands, 15 498 requests for grid capacity were on the waiting list at the end of June. A site that wants a megawatt per bay has to join those queues.

Batteries are the workaround, and they’re how most megawatt car chargers actually work. BYD’s flash chargers in Europe carry 370 kWh of storage each and draw 100 to 560 kW from the grid. The 1 MW site that Halo Energy and XPENG opened in Hong Kong in September runs on a 120–240 kW connection and a 400 kWh battery. That works as long as cars arrive one at a time. By our calculation, a full 370 kWh buffer covers about five 73 kWh charges back to back, and refilling it from a 100 kW connection takes almost four hours.

To be fair, motorway chargers aren’t what drives Europe’s grid bill. A Siemens study for ACEA and ChargeUp Europe put 78% of the grid investment EVs need by 2030 in the low-voltage grid, mostly for home charging. The cost of a megawatt charger lands on the site instead: a big connection that costs a lot to get and to keep, and is rarely used in full.

On the busiest days, nobody gets the megawatt

Power sharing is how most megawatt chargers will actually be built. Alpitronic’s HYC1000 is one 1 MW cabinet feeding up to eight dispensers, and Fastned is testing one against its standard HYC400. On a quiet site it works well. A fast-charging bay in our five markets is in use about 10% of the time, and BDEW puts the average for all public charge points in Germany at 12%. At that level, our model gives an arriving megawatt car about 910 kW on average if the other cars are ordinary ones.

Busy days are different. If the other cars are ordinary cars, the arriving car gets about 540 kW when half the bays are taken and about 360 kW at 70%, no more than a dedicated 350 kW charger would give. If the other cars are megawatt cars too, it drops below 350 kW once a third of the bays are in use. A full site gives every car 125 kW. Those busy hours aren’t rare. In July, 997 of the 8 237 European fast-charging sites with four or more bays that we track averaged 60% occupancy or more in their busiest hour of the week. At 180 of them it was 80% or more.

China had a live test last week. On the first day of the National Day holiday, motorway chargers delivered 3.24 times the energy of a normal day, according to the National Energy Administration. Over the first three days there were 2.97 million charging sessions at motorway service areas, about 24 kWh each by our calculation. That’s a top-up, around ten minutes on a 150 kW charger. Drivers still queued for two to three hours on the way home on 6 October, and the transport ministry listed 79 service areas where charging was especially busy.

Flash charging didn’t fix it. Drivers told Sina Finance that the storage at one brand’s flash chargers had run dry, and “flash charging was turned into slow charging”. The brand’s customer service blamed “large numbers of users and insufficient replenishment of the storage cabinets”. Xinhua’s verdict on the holiday was that pressure had eased compared with earlier years, because about 11 000 more high-power chargers had been added at service areas since January. What helped was more bays.

So what are 5 minutes worth?

Back to the question in the headline. On our cost model, a megawatt bay costs €70 000 to €103 000 a year more than a 300 kW bay. With the 5.2 sessions a day that today’s fast chargers get, that’s €37 to €55 per session, or €1.23 to €2.03 per kWh on top of the normal price. These are our numbers, built on published costs. The box above lists the inputs.

Divide that by 4.4 minutes and each minute saved costs €8 to €12. That’s the best case, where every car can use the megawatt and every driver sits in the car waiting. Official Dutch and German transport appraisals value a leisure driver’s time at 16 to 26 cents a minute. A business traveller on a long trip is worth about €1.25 a minute. The megawatt costs somewhere between 7 and 77 times what the time is worth.

Very few cars can use it, too. Of the 218 car models launched since 2024 with a published DC charging rating in our vehicle catalogue, 17 accept 500 kW or more, and all 17 come from Chinese manufacturers. That’s a count of models, not of cars on European roads, where the share is far smaller. If one car in ten could use a megawatt, each saved minute would cost €80 or more.

Where it does pay

Some drivers do put a high price on five minutes. Taxi and ride-hailing drivers sell their time. So do delivery fleets running two shifts, and anyone doing 1 000 km in a day on the Autobahn.

For a saved minute to cost about €1, roughly what a business driver’s minute is worth, a megawatt bay would need 43 to 64 megawatt-capable cars a day, with every driver waiting at the plug. That describes a taxi rank or a fleet depot, not a motorway service area. Those sites should get megawatt chargers. They’re just not a model for the rest of the network.

Where we’d spend the money

We’re not against faster batteries. A car that charges at 12C will do 20 to 80% in about ten minutes on the 350 kW chargers Europe already has. That’s a real improvement, and the charge point operator doesn’t pay for it.

The megawatt charger adds 4.4 minutes on top of that, for a few cars, on quiet days, for drivers who stay in the car. And it uses grid capacity, which is already the scarcest thing in charging. If you run a charging network and have money to spend, the queues are at small sites that need another bay, not at big sites that need a bigger cable. If you’re the driver, the car will usually be ready before your coffee is.

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