The home-charging number nobody quotes: your car's AC limit, not the wall's

Public charging gets the attention because it is where the anxiety lives. The number that will actually shape your ownership is quieter and lives on the spec sheet: how fast your car accepts AC power at home. We track that figure for 214 electric variants. The spread is wider than most buyers realise, and the slow end is full of cars people assume are quick.

The single most common AC limit in our data is 11kW, on 125 variants. Above that, ten models accept 22kW. Below it, twenty models are capped at 7.4kW or less, and several of those are mainstream sellers, not obscure imports.

Why the car’s number is the one that counts

An AC charger converts mains power for the battery using hardware inside the car, the onboard charger. The wallbox on your garage wall just supplies power. So the ceiling is set by the car, not the wall. Put an 11kW car on a 22kW wallbox and it charges at 11kW. Put a 7kW car on the same wallbox and it charges at 7kW. The extra capacity you paid the electrician to install does nothing.

This is the part that catches people. The wallbox is the visible purchase, the thing with a price and a brand, so it feels like the variable you control. It is not. The variable was fixed the day you chose the car.

Work the slow case through. A 60kWh battery at 7.4kW takes roughly eight hours to go from near empty to full. That is fine, arguably ideal, if you charge overnight on a home tariff and drive a normal day’s distance. It is a genuine problem if you need a large top-up during the day, or you are relying on a shared AC charger at work with a queue behind you, or you live somewhere you can only charge in a few-hour window.

At 22kW the same battery is done in under three hours. Whether that gap matters is entirely about how you live, which is exactly why it belongs in the buying decision and almost never makes it there.

Who is fast, who is slow, and the surprises in both lists

The 22kW list is mostly premium European: Audi Q8 e-tron, both Lotus models, three Mercedes-Benz lines, the Nissan Ariya, the Renault Scenic. The surprise entries are the two small Smart cars, the #1 and #3, which accept 22kW despite sitting well below the Mercedes price bracket. If fast AC charging matters to you and your budget does not stretch to an EQE, the Smarts are the ones to look at.

The capped-at-7.4kW list is the one worth reading closely, because it contains cars nobody thinks of as slow:

Model	AC charge limit
BYD Dolphin	7kW
BYD Atto 3	7kW
BYD Seal	7kW
MG MG4	6.6kW
MG ZS EV	6.6kW
Nissan Leaf	6.6kW
GWM Ora	6.6kW
Kia EV5	7kW

Several of the best-selling affordable EVs in the country are on that list. This is not a criticism of the cars. A single onboard charger is a sensible place for a manufacturer to save cost on a budget model, and for an overnight-charging owner it changes nothing. But it means the cheap, popular, fast-selling EV in your driveway is often the slow one on AC, and the premium car you did not buy is often the quick one. That inverts the assumption most people carry.

BYD is the clearest example. Every BYD we track tops out at 7kW on AC. The cars are quick on DC, and BYD leans on that in its marketing, but the home-charging number is modest across the entire range.

What this means when you are choosing a wallbox

Match the wallbox to the car, not to the biggest number the electrician offers.

If your car is 7kW, a 7kW single-phase wallbox is the whole story and a three-phase 22kW unit plus the wiring to feed it is money set on fire. If your car is 11kW, which most now are, you want three-phase to reach it, and a single-phase 7kW box will hold you at 7kW forever. If your car is one of the ten 22kW models and you genuinely need the speed at home, then and only then does the top-end wallbox earn its cost.

Check the car’s onboard AC figure before you spend a cent on home charging hardware. It is one line on the spec sheet and it decides the entire question.

What to watch

The onboard charger is a quiet cost-down target, so expect the slow end of this list to stay populated as more budget models arrive. The number to hunt for on any spec sheet is the AC or onboard charging figure in kW, not the DC fast-charging headline the brochure leads with. Those are different numbers measuring different things, and the brochure will always show you the bigger one.

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Sources and method. AC charging figures are from Cardinkum’s catalogue of current Australian-market electric variants, recorded against manufacturer sources between late March and mid-April 2026. Counts: 214 variants carry an AC charge-rate figure; 125 are rated 11kW, ten accept 22kW, twenty are capped at 7.4kW or below. Model-level figures cited are the values recorded for the current Australian variant and reflect the spec at time of capture; onboard charger ratings can differ between trims and model years, so confirm the figure for the exact variant you are buying. Charge-time estimates are arithmetic from battery capacity and charge rate and ignore the tapering and overhead of real charging, so treat them as order-of-magnitude, not a stopwatch.