@mbeadnell -- Sorry in advance for the long post; I've seen the following discussed in other forums, but not here, so I'm going to break the concepts down in detail. Apologies if you've heard some of this before; I'm also writing it for the person I was 6 years ago, who dearly wished he knew all this when he bought his Chevy Bolt, once upon a time.
"Short commutes" and "Charge times" is a little vague. Let's break it out by 'level' for the Chevy.
| Level | Volts at wall | Amps at wall (note, these #s are derated by 20% from breaker rating per elec code) So, 10A on a 15A circuit, 40A on a 50A circuit, etc | kW at Charger | Approx charge time (empty to full) in hours = (batt capacity in kwh)/(charger kw) |
| 1 | 120VAC | 10 | 1.2 | 200kwh/1.2kw ~= 166h |
| 2 | 240VAC | 40 | 9.6 | 200kwh/9.6kw ~= 21h |
| 2 | 240VAC | 80 | 19.2 | 200kwh/19.2kw ~= 10h |
| 3 | It's Complicated but 800VDC | It's Complicated | It's Complicated, up to 350kw | It's Complicated b/c calculus, and also b/c you never L3 charge to full but only about 80%. But to make easy math, say 200kwh/300kw = 0.66hr = 40m. |
So, if you're charging at L1, the Ford and Chevy will charge at about the same rate, because the limiting factor is your wall outlet. Charging one vehicle from empty may take longer than charging the other, but only because one's battery may be bigger than the other, like having a bigger gas tank. You can figure out if this works for you by figuring out how many miles you drive, guesstimating how many kwh that'll consume, and then dividing it out in the right column of the table above. (so if you use 12kwh/day, even at L1 you'll be good to go in about 10 hrs of overnight charging.) The above table doesn't account for resistive losses in the cables, inefficiency in the charger, etc, so real world numbers will be, say, 5% worse, but you get the general idea.
If you're on a road trip, you'll almost surely be charging at L3, aka DC Fast Charge or DCFC, and that's where Things Get Complicated. I'm not a battery expert, but the basic idea is that the batteries don't charge at the same speeds at 10% full as they do at 90% full. If you imagine a graph with power(kw) on the Y axis and battery charge % on the X axis, the L1 and L2 charge lines are basically flat, constant power whether at 10% or 90%. But L3 is mopre complicated. It's easier for people to rush into a stadium when most seats are empty, but hard and slow when empty seats are hard to find and hard to reach. DCFC behaves similarly, and instead of a constant rate (straight line) you get a curve. And in fact that's the term for this-- the 'charge curve'. Higher, and flatter, is better-- means you can push more power into the battery, fast, for longer - which means less time charging. To 'really' figure out how long it'll take to charge either vehicle, you integrate under the charge curve. It's just that that is really easy when the line's horizontal and flat; you just multiply like we did in the table.
Note that this is also why folks say not to DCFC past about 80% -- it gets hard for power to 'find a place to sit down' so charging gets very slow. It's actually faster to charge to ~80% and then drive down to 20% and charge 'fast' again, so that's what folks do.
Stepping back out of the math for a minute, the big difference between the Chevy and Ford is that the Ford's L3 system will only accept up to 400V compared to Chevy's 800V. So while it's not exact (because charge curves), I expect the Ford to take significantly longer (say twice as long?) to charge up while in the middle of a road trip. That, specifically, is why I cancelled my F150 reservation and got in line for a Silverado EV. I like almost everything else about the Ford better, but I'm not interested in twiddling my thumbs at a rest stop for say 90 minutes instead of 45, twice, on an already-long drive to visit my family.
