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The wall connector (which is what I’ve got) attaches to a 240V circuit and supplies AC power to the car. The car has a charger (or 2) on board that takes that power, converts it to DC, and charges the battery.
The wall connector can be hooked up to a couple of different amp circuits. Mine is a 100 amp circuit, meaning the wall connector can supply 80 Amps continuous power to the car, and it’s two onboard chargers can each convert 40 of that into DC for the battery.
All told, my car will add about 60 rated miles an hour to its range when plugged into this circuit.
The big boxes you see at public supercharging stations would differently. They convert the AC mains feed into DC power in pedestal mounted box, and then feed that dc power into the car. That power bypasses the car’s charger(s) entirely and goes straight into the car’s battery.
Superchargers are big because of that, though the pedestal looking thing that says “Tesla” on it isn’t the charger stack; it’s just a mount for the cable. The chargers stacks are usually white boxes with big fans mounted on them, about 5’ tall and 2’ wide—typically they sit next to a transformer behind some decorative fencing.
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