The United States doesn't have five-minute fast-charging for electric vehicles like China does. That's just an unfortunate reality. But it doesn't mean that EVs for sale over here aren't making tremendous progress at charging more quickly.
You'll pay top dollar for them, but right now, America's fast-charging kings are the 2025 Porsche Taycan and the 2026 Lucid Gravity. Both cars boast high-voltage electric architectures, advanced motors and batteries and a laser-focus on both efficiency and getting you back on the road as quickly as possible.
The Gravity can theoretically accept up to 400 kW of peak charging power, while the Taycan is rated at up to 320 kW. But given the Taycan has a smaller battery that should take less time to charge up, in a head-to-head test, that may be a fair fight.
And that's exactly what InsideEVs Contributing Editor and State of Charge YouTube channel host Tom Moloughney did recently. It's a showdown between America's two fastest-charging EVs, and indeed some of the fastest-charging cars, period, save for the stuff made by China's BYD and the rest. "If there was such a thing as an EV charging drag race, today's video would be it," Tom said.
The average session at a DC public fast-charger in America was around 42 minutes in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. But real-world results obviously depends on any number of factors: the individual car's battery size, its starting charge level, the speed of the charger itself, the weather outside and so on. Many EVs boast much quicker charging times; my own Kia EV6 can generally charge from about 10% to 80% on a 350-kilowatt charger, for example. And then we get into each car's charging curve, a fancy term for how long it can hold its maximum speed while charging.
So if you hooked up a Taycan and a Gravity to a 350 kW station—in this case, the same EVGo charger—under the same conditions, and both started from 0%, how would they do?
Well, in Tom's test, the Gravity starts pulling 350 kW speeds almost immediately, while the Taycan needs a minute to get going. After five minutes, the Taycan has a higher charge level on the battery, because that battery is smaller. The Gravity is still seeing more energy dispensed more quickly—30 kWh to the Taycan's 23 kWh—and at higher charging speeds. At 10 minutes in, the Taycan is at 48% and speeds of 311 kW, while the Gravity is at 42% and 277 kW. However, the charger has dispensed more energy to the Lucid than the Porsche.
Fifteen minutes in, there's only a 2 kWh difference in the amount of energy dispensed into the cars. But the Taycan is at almost 70% while the Gravity is at 55%. By 19 minutes in, the Taycan reaches that ideal 80% state of charge for road trips—it's rarely advisable to go all the way to 100% on a public DC fast-charger, but Tom does it here—and the Gravity is at 64%. Yet the Gravity is pulling faster charging speeds, still. The Gravity later hits 80% in 27 minutes.
But 80% charge on the Taycan means fewer driving miles than 80% charge on the Gravity. More on that in a bit.
Seems like the Taycan is the winner, right? Not so fast. "The Gravity's charger has dispensed 10 more kilowatt hours, and that alone can account for 40 to 50 miles of driving range with Gravity, and that has to be considered," Tom said. Eventually, the Porsche hits 100% after 53 minutes, because the remaining 20% after 80% takes way longer. And the Lucid gets to 100% full after 74 minutes.
Any EV veteran will tell you it's that whatever-low-number-to-80% stat that really matters, especially for two luxury cars with bigger batteries like these two. And both get that done in under a half an hour from totally empty. "If you know anything about electric vehicle charging, you were impressed by that," Tom said. These two vehicles can add the kilowatt-hours like nothing else I've ever recorded. They are charging beasts and, for sure, are the two fastest charging electric vehicles you can buy here in North America currently."
But in the end, Tom notes that the Gravity was kind of handicapped here. It was working off a 350 kW charger when it can do up to 400 kW. There just aren't many 400 kW chargers out there yet, and of the widely available options, 350 kW is pretty much as good as you get. It's a question of what the Gravity's true potential is, Tom said. The rest of the test assesses this from data from another charging test where the Gravity was able to use a 400 kW charger.
And when you look at how long it takes to add actual miles of driving range—not just a battery percentage number—the Gravity is the clear winner.
Tom thinks, as I do, that it's only a matter of time before the five-minute charging EVs seen in China and the technology behind them come stateside. Until we do, and until anything shows up to beat it, the Lucid Gravity seems to be America's fast-charging champion.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
