Kyle and Walter from Out of Spec Reviews get exclusive access to the Alpitronic HYC1000 at the company's Charlotte, NC headquarters for its first North American charge session. The split-system charger separates the power cabinet from its dispensers, outputs up to 1 megawatt total, and delivers 600 amps continuous to each port using oil-cooled cables.
Eight outputs and 62.5 kW granularity let the onboard switching matrix reallocate power between vehicles in real time. As cars charge and their demand drops, the stacks free up automatically and redirect to the next vehicle that needs them. New generation silicon carbide power stacks push each module to 125 kW, up from 100 kW in the HYC400 and 75 kW in the earlier HYC300.
The dispensers run a front-facing touchscreen alongside physical buttons for drivers in gloves, integrated cable management that ships standard rather than as an accessory, LED lighting for branding, and an SOC indicator visible from a distance. MCS connectors for heavy trucks are supported on the same power cabinet. A high-power variant of the dispenser can stack two 600-amp outputs simultaneously for vehicles like the Mercedes-AMG that request over 1,000 amps.
The first charge on Kyle's Tesla Model S hit 252 kW at 600 amps continuously. Cables were still cool to the touch. Alpitronic's Charlotte HQ also runs nearly 300 kW of rooftop solar, offsetting around 80% of the building's energy use, including the chargers. The site's test lab runs a regenerative load system that can cycle a full megawatt of power using less than 100 amps from the grid by feeding the DC output back as AC input.
The HYC1000 can start with as few as four dispensers and expand to a full eight later, with conduit runs and wiring done upfront to make future additions straightforward. Linking multiple power cabinets for sites larger than eight stalls is planned for a future software release.