Hyundai's Ioniq 5 Is A Charging Hero. Here's How It Does On A Tesla Supercharger

The Tesla NACS revolution comes to the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Here's how Hyundai engineers worked to get charging speeds just right.

• The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 comes from the factory with a Tesla-style NACS plug, the first non-Tesla to use that format.
• It will still pull the fast-charging speeds the Ioniq 5 is famous for. But performance will be different on the Tesla Superchargers due to their voltage differences.
• Using an adapter for standard CCS fast chargers won't affect speeds, however.

When you buy a Hyundai Ioniq 5, you're getting a lot of car. For years now, it's been one of the most-awarded and top-ranked electric cars for its combination of range, style and performance. But arguably the coup de grâce has been its fast-charging prowess. Like other cars on the Hyundai Motor Group's E-GMP platform, the Ioniq 5 is capable of using some of the most powerful DC fast chargers around, and can use them to rocket from a 10% charge to 80% in just 18 minutes.

So when Hyundai decided that the newly American-made 2025 Ioniq 5 would use a Tesla-style North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug from the factory, this presented engineers with an interesting problem: how do they get the car to perform the same way if it used a Tesla Supercharger?

In a briefing with InsideEVs and other journalists a few weeks ago, Hyundai Motor America engineers said they're confident they pulled it off. And that while Ioniq 5 owners won't get the crazy-fast charging speeds they're accustomed to if they use Tesla's Supercharger network, they'll still be impressed, and other DC fast chargers will work as well as they always have.

"There is an entire division in Ann Arbor that works on charging and studies this," Hyundai spokesperson Miles Johnson said at the briefing. If the Ioniq 5 didn't charge as well as everyone expected, he said, "We wouldn't be putting this stuff out. It has to work, and it has to be at our levels and at our standard."

How The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Charges

The charging speeds for the updated American-spec Ioniq 5—which is now the first non-Tesla EV to use a Tesla-style plug from the factory—breaks down like this.

There are now two ways to fast-charge the EV. Owners can plug in natively at a Tesla Supercharger station just a Tesla Model Y or Cybertruck owner would. When they do, the peak charging rate they will see on most Superchargers (the V3 ones, specifically) they will see maximum speeds of 135 kW. That should take the Ioniq 5 from 10% to 80% in 24 minutes if the car has the smaller 63 kWh battery pack.

On the larger battery pack most Ioniq 5 trim levels will have, a Tesla Supercharger will take it from 10% to 80% in 29 minutes.

The other way to fast-charge is to use another adapter—this one for Combined Charging System (CCS) plugs, which represent most non-Tesla plugs out there from Electrify America and other providers. Many of those now supply faster charging speeds than Tesla's network does.

Using the CCS adapter, Ioniq 5 owners will see speeds of up to 257 kW when they use a 350 kW DC fast charger. That should take the car from 10% to 80% in 20 minutes, regardless of their battery size. And it's right in line with the performance of the previous Ioniq 5 on a CCS fast-charger.

In other words, "the adapter does not affect the charging speed," said Karl Holodnick, Engineering Manager for Propulsion and Charging at Hyundai America's Technical Center. Moreover, he said, the 2025 Ioniq 5 will actually be faster to charge on the Tesla network than the past cars did when they used the Tesla Magic Dock stations. Those maxed out around 99 kW, but now they can hit speeds there of up to 135 kW. "There are some differences in the battery design, where we're able to charge at a higher current now," Holodnick said.

So if this bears out, the 2025 Ioniq 5 will maintain its reputation as one of the quickest-charging EVs in its class—if not the quickest. By comparison, a similarly priced Chevrolet Equinox EV can accept DC fast-charging up to just 150 kW and in our testing will only go from 20% to 80% in 35 minutes. Similarly, a Tesla Model Y can usually charge from 10% to 80% in approximately 27 minutes on a Tesla 250 kW charger.

The new Tesla NACS-equipped Ioniq 5s will come with a CCS adapter, while current Ioniq 5 owners will be able to purchase a Tesla-style adapter for their cars soon too. More details on the latter are coming soon, Hyundai officials said, but they expect all current owners to get their adapters and be able to access the Tesla network in the first quarter of 2025. When the 2025 Ioniq 5 launches, it will be ready from the start to use the Tesla network.

As for plug-and-charge, the feature that allows Tesla owners to seamlessly roll up to a charger and pay automatically from an online account without fiddling with some smartphone app, that is currently under development.

"We're working on all these integration pieces to make that possible," said Ian Tupper, the Senior Group Manager of Strategic Environmental Partnerships at Hyundai. "At the start, our owners of the model year 25 Ioniq 5 will have to use the Tesla app to charge, but we're also adding the charging feature to the Hyundai app as well."

The 2025 Ioniq 5 will also be capable of vehicle-to-load (V2L) bidirectional charging like past models, which allows it to power other devices or even entire homes if needed. And like past cars, that will work through an exterior adapter that works with the new NACS plug.

It's not immediately clear if cars like the Kia EV6 or Genesis GV60, which use the same hardware as the Ioniq 5 and will release similar adapters and then NACS plugs soon, will offer the same performance or not. Presumably, this data gives us a good idea of what to expect from those cars.

What's The Difference?

For newcomers to the EV world—people used to pulling up to a gas station, (hopefully) knowing which octane to choose and then simply driving off after the pump is done—the world of charging curves, kilowatt hours and plug types can feel confounding.

It's part of why the whole American auto industry is moving to Tesla's plug standard, now officially more called SAE J3400. After Ford first negotiated a deal for its EVs to use Tesla's charging network and then switch to its plug, other carmakers quickly followed, fed up with the unreliable and inconsistent experiences at existing EV charging networks. Tesla's Supercharger network is not only the largest one, but also widely considered the best.

Part of that quality, however, was because Tesla famously controls the entire hardware and software experience for cars and chargers from top to bottom. Getting other types of EVs—which use many different batteries, software setups and so on—to use the Tesla network similarly has been a challenge at times. Moreover, the switch to NACS plugs and Tesla Supercharger access has been delayed at several moments this year, reportedly in part after Tesla's charging team layoffs this spring.

But there's been another challenge for the engineers behind EVs like the Ioniq 5: voltage. Simply put, that's the power that "pushes" electricity, and it applies to both the cars themselves and their chargers.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 and most of the otehr Hyundai E-GMP cars are 800-volt EVs. Only a few others are right now, like the Porsche Taycan and Lucid Air, although the whole industry is gradually moving in that direction. Most other EVs are capable of 400 volts—long the industry standard. And most Tesla models (save for the new Cybertruck) are 350 or 400 volt EVs.

The Tesla Supercharger network was designed for those cars. Most of them run around 500 volts, Hyundai officials said. But Hyundai's own EVs are capable of faster charging speeds in part thanks to their higher voltage ratings. In other words, it was a challenge for engineers to get an Ioniq 5 to perform on a Tesla Supercharger as it might on a 350-kW Electrify America station.

And with maximum speeds of 135 kW on a Tesla Supercharger, they won't, Hyundai officials said. But that's just what the Tesla chargers are capable of in terms of speed and voltage. However, being able to go from 10% to 80% in 29 minutes for a car with up to 318 miles of range is still quite respectable, and seemingly about what a comparable Model Y can do anyway.

We look forward to testing the NACS-equipped 2025 Ioniq 5 on the Tesla Superchargers and other charging platforms as soon as we get our hands on one. But for now, for people who want to use the Tesla network yet want to own something that isn't a Tesla, these early results seem promising.

Contact the author: [email protected]

More Ioniq 5 News

• The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Starts At $43,975, XRT At $56,875
• The Hyundai Ioniq 5 Is Surging And The New One Isn't Even Out Yet
• Hyundai RN24 ‘Rolling Lab’ Is The Kind Of Car You Make Just For The Fun Of It
• Best Electric Cars For First-Time EV Buyers
• The Hyundai Ioniq 5 Will Join Waymo’s Driverless Taxi Fleet
• Her Vet Clinic Went Down In Hurricane Helene. Two EVs Powered It Back Up