Domestic charging points
At Opel, we make charging your electric car as convenient as possible with our efficient and easy-to-use charging systems. A wallbox, for example, is the safest, fastest and most convenient solution for charging your electric car at home.
Charging process
At fast charging stations, you can charge the battery of your Opel electric car to up to 80% in half an hour. Perfect for longer journeys, because after a short stop you can quickly continue your journey. If you charge your car overnight - or during the day at work - fast charging is not necessary. Then the battery is also charged more gently.
It still sounds like the future, but developments for inductive charging are already underway. What is already widespread with smartphones will soon also be possible with electric vehicles. All you have to do is drive the car onto an inductive charging surface and the charging process begins. Until then, however, Opel will continue to offer cable and wallbox solutions that enable simple and intuitive charging at home and on the road.
Charging systems
When charging an electric car, a distinction is made between direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). Direct current is used for fast charging. This is particularly practical if you want to avoid longer stops, because the battery of your electric car can be charged up to 80% in around 30 minutes.
Alternating current is used for regular charging. It is used throughout Europe for household power connections and is ideal for charging electric cars.
Basically, the battery of an electric car can only accept direct current (DC), so the alternating current (AC) from the mains must be converted beforehand.
A distinction is also made between single-phase and three-phase charging. Single-phase is the domestic mains with its protective contact socket. It can provide an average charging power of 2.3 kW at a voltage of 230 V and a current strength of 16 A. However, to charge your electric car quickly, a power of at least 3.7 kW is needed. For this purpose, there are three-phase sockets. These have a voltage of up to 400 V and a current of 16 A or 32 A. The charging capacity here is between 11 kW and 32 kW. The charging power is between 11 kW and 22 kW.
According to the CEE standard, single-phase sockets are blue and three-phase sockets are red. The so-called type 2 sockets are now the EU-wide standard. The corresponding so-called "Mennekes plug" allows 1-phase and 3-phase charging of electric cars.
A future topic is so-called bidirectional charging, for which special wallboxes are required. Here, the exchange of energy runs in two directions. If a car is charged and not being driven, the energy from the battery can be used to supply the household - or fed back into the grid.
Financial advantages
In addition to the so-called innovation bonus of the Federal Republic of Germany, pure electric cars are subsidised with up to 9,000 €, plug-in hybrids receive a subsidy of up to 6,750 €. For plug-in hybrids, however, the same regulations apply to the innovation premium as to the environmental bonus: they are only subsidised if they emit no more than 50 grams of CO₂ per kilometre or have a minimum purely electric range of 40 kilometres by the end of 2021, a minimum range of 60 kilometres from 2022, and at least 80 kilometres from 2025.
In addition, there is a further subsidy for the purchase and connection of wallboxes from KfW Bank, which for the first time also supports the installation of private charging stations on residential buildings with €900 per charging point - for owners and homeowners' associations, for tenants and landlords.
By the way, if you drive an electric car as a company car, you save on company car tax: since the beginning of 2020, drivers will only have to pay a flat monthly tax on private use of one quarter of the assessment basis - that is 25 percent of the gross list price.
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Useful information on home charging
How does charging an electric car work?
The battery of an electric car can only accept direct current (DC), so the alternating current (AC) from the mains must be converted beforehand. If this is done via the on-board charger in the car, it is called AC charging. If this process is carried out by a rectifier in the charging station, it is called DC charging.
When charging AC, the available charging power can be calculated according to this formula: Charging power = phases x voltage x amperage. The decisive factors are therefore the available mains voltage, the amperage and whether single-phase or three-phase charging is used.