Make an eletric car that goes 400 miles on a charge and can be recharged in 15 minutes and you will sell them. Until you can do that the thing will not sell.I'd even settle for 30 minutes on the recharge, as long as the recharge stations are next to McDonalds.
But no more than 30 minutes. That's the absolute outside maximum.
And now I'm wondering, let's say you could do that, charge up in 30 minutes... when the battery is brand new.
I wonder what the charge time would be in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th years...
Good question, recharge time wouldn’t change, but battery capacity does change. For example the current hybrids make the batteries large enough so they can handle the 30% change in capacity you see over a 100,000 mile life time.
They also have lots of battery management support so they don’t stress the battery.. which points out another problem with pure electric cars. Completely draining the battery will shorten the battery life.
now to your charging question. Lets make some quick assumptions. From the Tesla motors site, they claim you need 300Wh/mile, so 400 miles gives you a 120 KWh battery. To charge this in 30 minutes you need to supply 240 KW for 30 minutes. A single phase 220 V supply would need 1100 Amps.
No way do I want to stand by that. You would need to use higher voltages, and a 3 phase supply to get the amperage down to a safe level.