One of the many selling points of the new 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 2022 Kia EV6 electric vehicles, which share their Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP) and drivetrain technology, is that they use 800-volt batteries rather than the more common 400-volt systems. They’re among few EVs with voltages this high, and the only affordable ones so far. The theoretical advantage of higher voltages is faster DC charging when supplied with enough power, so we were anxious to see if the charging performance of our Ioniq 5 and EV6 loaners would surpass the consistent disappointment of most EVs and perhaps get closer to making public fast charging … tolerable.
The short answer is that these cars do charge faster than key competitors, in our experience, but they aren’t our saviors. Anyone who can’t charge at home can still hold onto that internal-combustion vehicle, probably for years to come.
We should elaborate: We sort of hate public charging, especially DC fast charging, and many owners agree. The reasons may include how erratic public charger operability and availability are, especially in the Chicago area, which has been slow to get with the EV program, but as we detailed in our Guide for the EV Curious, the biggest problems are that fast charging isn’t truly fast; its cost eliminates the advantage of electric motoring (especially versus normal gas prices); and most automakers acknowledge that frequent use will damage a car’s battery. And that’s when everything goes how it’s supposed to, which it seldom has for us, including in the tests below. But we’ll leave those gripes to the end. Just bear in mind that if it seems like Hyundai and Kia are catching a lot of flak here, it’s merely for failing to save us from a shortcoming that makes all EVs less attractive compared with the established alternative: liquid-fueled vehicles that take a few minutes to refill regardless of how cold it is outside.
Electrify America 350-kW DC fast charger | Cars.com photo by Joe Bruzek
To lay the groundwork, charging a car that has an 800-volt battery at its fastest speed requires a powerful enough charger, a type that’s proliferating but remains rare. Both of these cars require 240 kilowatts or higher for the speediest results but can use a charger of any rating providing it has the combined charging system (CCS) connector. If the charger runs on a voltage lower than 800, a device called a DC-DC boost converter onboard either model can upconvert the power to 800 volts. But Hyundai said this seldom comes into play in the U.S., because even lower-powered DC chargers here almost always have 800 volts at the ready and adjust for whatever the vehicle needs. As a result, the maximum charging rate for an Ioniq 5 at a 150-kW charger should be 150 kW, Hyundai said. So we started there.
2022 Ioniq 5 Limited AWD
2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Limited at 150-kW DC fast charger | Cars.com photo by Joe Wiesenfelder
150-kW DC Charger
Partly for parity with competing models we’ve fast-charged, we started with a brief session on an Electrify America 150-kW charger. The charger’s display and the Ioniq 5’s instrument panel both said it would take 30 minutes to reach 80%.
The battery began at a 12% state of charge with 26 miles of range left. The initial charging rate was 70 kW, and the highest we saw in our five-minute trial was 81 kW. When we stopped, we’d added 4.6 kilowatt-hours, 6% and 13 miles of range at a cost of $1.72.
Batteries typically charge faster when empty than full, and we started close to empty, so we weren’t very impressed with charging rates between 70 kW and 80 kW. Suffice it to say if this car is robust enough to accept even more power with the right charger — and if 150 kW is its legitimate ceiling with this type of lower-powered charger — we really expected to see it. On the same level of EA charger, we’ve seen a Ford Mustang Mach-E (with a 150-kW charging maximum) top out in the 80-kW range as well, and a Volkswagen ID.4 (125-kW charging maximum) stall at 50-some kW.
To be fair, as we always try to be, there’s a chance a longer session would have yielded a higher charging rate. Our experience below suggests this car likes to walk before it runs, charging-wise — but our goal on this day was to try “ultra-fast” charging, and we didn’t want to linger too long at the wimpier charger. We wish we had more time with our test vehicles, but we have a lot to accomplish in a short period; it’s why we purchase long-term vehicles when we can.
Conditions
EVs are … particular when it comes to fast-charging, so we should address the most obvious factors that can affect charging speed. Though it was the end of February, it was 53 degrees out when we charged the Ioniq 5 — not the ideal “room temperature,” but not subfreezing either. The EA network isn’t known for throttling its charging rates as some independently owned hardware can. Further, there were no other cars charging when we conducted our tests.
Winter Mode setting as shown on 2022 Kia EV6 | Cars.com photo by Joe Bruzek
I drove the Ioniq 5 nearly 40 miles, mostly interstate, to the nearest EA station with a 350-kW charger, which should have ensured decent battery temperature. Driving raises battery temperature, as does the car’s Winter mode, which uses the battery heater to ensure full acceleration and faster DC charging. Hyundai is vague about what exactly the mode does and at what ambient temperature, but it was activated. (Tesla’s approach, which warms the battery specifically for Supercharging if you use the navigation system to route yourself there, suggests that this factor can’t be left to chance.)
Managing Editor Joe Bruzek returned to this site with the Kia EV6 on a different day with different weather, as described below.
350-kW DC Charger No. 1
We’d chosen this location for its one functional 350-kW charger (the app indicated the second 350-kW unit was “unavailable” as opposed to “in-use”), so we simply moved the Ioniq 5 over and hooked up. This time, the charger’s screen said it would take 26 minutes to reach 80%, suggesting the same rate.
Sure enough, the 350-kW charger was feeding the car 74 kW, but it began to increase. After about 10 minutes, it was at 115 kW and 36%. When the battery capacity hit 47%, the rate increased to 156 kW, which is the fastest we’d seen from any EV.
At the 18-minute mark, we stopped the session. Why? Because we’re trying to get an idea how close our reality is to Hyundai’s “up-to” claims. Hyundai’s materials say rapid charging greater than 250 kW should bring the battery from 10%-80% in 18 minutes. Our 18 minutes brought the Ioniq 5 only from 18%-56%. We added 38% to the battery state of charge rather than the suggested 70%, just better than half.
This session added 32 kWh and 93 miles of range at a cost of $13.76.
350-kW DC Charger No. 2
I know, I said the other charger was unavailable, because that’s what the app said, but the kiosk’s screen looked normal, we still had battery capacity to fill, and we were unsatisfied with the charging rate we’d seen.
We said what the hell and connected to the “unavailable” 350-kW charger, which displayed “Initiating charging” on its screen for a while before doing just that … for free. It never asked for an account. (If I were the EA network, I’d label this charger unavailable, too, because it turned out the only thing that was unavailable was our money in their pocket.)
Almost instantly, the charging rate shot up to 217 kW — a new high — then it hit 220 kW. We were elated! Within less than a minute, it was over. At about 60%, the charging rate dropped back down to 132 kW and stayed in the 130s until it neared 80% and began its decrease to below 100 kW. The downward ramp near 80% is normal for battery health. The Ioniq 5 gets credit for maintaining this high of a rate above 80%. By comparison, the 2021 Mach-E we charged slowed to 12 kW at this point, making DC charging no longer worthwhile. Though the 2021 VW ID.4’s charging was less robust overall, it stayed close to 40 kW from 80% to 90%.
Rates as high as 220 kW definitely aren’t common; we just wish it had lasted longer than a minute.
This session took 9 minutes and added roughly 68 miles and 25% to the battery’s state of charge. (Coincidentally, 68 miles is how much a Hyundai press release says a 350-kW charger should be able to add in 5 minutes — another example of our results being just over half of the expectation.) How much this session cost was “unavailable.”
2022 Kia EV6 GT-Line AWD
350-kW DC Charger
Our EV6 test took place on a different day but at the same Electrify America station. Perhaps fatefully, it was below freezing this time — 29 degrees versus 53 degrees for the Ioniq 5. We used the “available” 350-kW charger because we aren’t common criminals. The 30-minute session went from 23% to 84% state of charge, from 58 to 221 miles of estimated range and added 52.5 kWh at a cost of $22.36.
The charging rate started in the 70-kW range, accelerated to 115 kW and then — like the Ioniq 5 — jumped to 130 kW when the battery’s state of charge hit 47%. Is 47% a magic threshold? Unfortunately, it never went as high as the Ioniq 5 did, even briefly, perhaps due to the colder temperatures, topping out at 134.1 kW. Like the Ioniq 5, the EV6 had been driven plenty before charging — more than an hour.
The Bottom Line(s)
There’s more than one bottom line here, and we’ll start with the general one, answering the question asked in the headline: Yes, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charged faster than most other EVs in our experience based on the power transferred — roughly twice as fast as key competitors, which seems appropriate given that their battery voltage is twice as high. Though it bears noting that our Tesla Model Y — a 400-volt vehicle — has logged rates as high as 127 kW on a 150-kW Supercharger and 149 kW on a 250-kW Supercharger. Being a more efficient vehicle, it arguably charged even faster based on the metric that matters most to owners: miles added over the given time.
We’ll take this 800-volt improvement happily because DC fast charging isn’t actually fast. But where the Kia and Hyundai are exactly like their direct competitors is in their failure to meet their claimed potential in any meaningful way. To our way of thinking, that would mean hitting 240 kW not just briefly but sustained, consistently and without the usual litany of excuses, both “legitimate” (it’s cold out) and phantom (conditions seem perfect and the results still underwhelm). Consumers won’t tolerate either.
Hyundai and Kia aren’t the only automakers to suggest higher DC charging performance than a consumer can expect to experience. It seems to be all of them. Manufacturers are still finding their way, and some have already learned not to set unrealistic expectations by giving maximum DC charging rates, or at least to distinguish more clearly the difference between the charger rating (150 kW, 350 kW) and the charging speeds owners might expect to see. In time, they’ll also learn either to meet best-case scenarios consistently or to emphasize how rare they are, or they’ll be held accountable.
The other bottom line is cost, and because Illinois allows charging networks to bill by the kilowatt-hour, it’s simply a matter of the cost ($0.43/kWh from EA unless you have freebies, which Hyundai, Kia and others include with purchase) times how many kWh you add. We then divide that by the miles added.
Our cost per kilowatt-hour at the Electrify America network | Cars.com photo by Joe Bruzek
Our brief Ioniq 5 session at the 150-kW charger worked out to 13 cents per mile. The 350-kW sessions rounded to 15 cents per mile for the Ioniq 5 and 14 cents for the EV6. This is roughly triple what we’d have paid to home-charge these cars, eliminating the advantage of electric motoring over normal gas prices. No matter how you slice it, public charging is no bargain — though it is a necessary evil. Think of it as a last resort.
What Else Went Wrong?
As noted above, only one of two 350-kW chargers at the Electrify America station was operational. Three weeks later, it’s still the case.
I don’t fixate much on the notorious inconvenience of public-charger billing, which may require different memberships, cards or apps for different networks, because gas stations aren’t exactly high tech, but it’s irritating when you do what you’re supposed to and it doesn’t work: The functional chargers didn’t recognize my Electrify America smartphone app. The phone vibrated briefly when placed on the kiosk, but it never started a session. Fortunately Bruzek had the app too, and his worked on the first try. The health and stability of various networks and regions varies, but our experience in the Chicago area is consistently poor. The nationwide availability and consistency of Tesla Superchargers is one of the factors behind our naming the Model Y our Best EV of 2022. (The Ioniq 5 and EV6 weren’t available for thorough evaluation before our deliberations, so we will consider them next year, taking into account performances like those above).
Most of the EV world, including models like the Ioniq 5 and EV6, await Tesla-level billing simplicity in the form of Plug&Charge functionality, to be activated later.
We had to drive about 40 minutes and nearly 40 miles from home (more than 45 miles from downtown Chicago) to the closest 350-kW charger, which is understandable given how few vehicles can exploit this level. More 150-kW units have finally appeared closer to home. To hear people talk about public EV charging, you’d think scarcity is the biggest problem. Is it really? I’m reminded of the century-old joke often credited to the film “Annie Hall” in which one diner says, “The food here is terrible,” and the other says, “Yeah, and such small portions.”
Maybe I’m just waiting for the day I can be irritated closer to home.
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Keyword: Do the 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 Really Have Faster Charging Times Than Other EVs?