Taycan to the Norwegian Fjords (Summer 2024 Trip Journal)

[Scandinavian]

Friday afternoon??
That really is miserable service from Porsche. Unbelievable in todays connected cars

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[Speuk]

Good to hear you got it resolved @Speuk. Unfortunately the log out and in didn’t work for me.

I just chatted to Porsche Connect support and they said that some customers did get fixed today but others they are hoping to get resolved by Friday afternoon.

Did you delete your profile in the car or just log out? I deleted mine then added it back. It may amount to the same thing.
Others have reported having to do a factory reset on the pcm which then requires you to re enter your personal setting

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 5: Kristiansand (Norway) –> Stavanger (Norway)

Today is the first – of many – sightseeing days – sticking to the scenic Road 44 on a route called Jæren. We've taken it previously on our winter trip to Tromsø and really enjoyed it. We've plotted in our route into Apple Maps and this will be one of our first times using it via CarPlay due to the issues that Porsche Connect Services are having.

We collect our car from nearby public car park – where the sunlight is marking the way forward perfectly!



It isn't long before we're leaving Kristiansand and into our first Norwegian tunnel.

As expected – in summer – we get stuck behind a number of camper vans and caravans. Expected doesn't mean we enjoyed it!

It was forecasted to rain heavily today – and while it did for a portion – it really was warm, dry and sunny for most of it. The Pirelli's grip in the wet and slippery surfaces is always impressive and reassuring.

We pull in to admire the view – but don't take as many pictures as we usually do – we'll get more practiced across the next few days.



As we near Stavanger – we pull into an IONITY to top-up our battery. As we have been using Apple Maps – we don't have a pre-conditioned battery – and it is noticeable. The car starts to accept 140 kW of energy – where the usual would have been closer to 250 kW.

After we're fully charged – well 99% – we head into Stavanger for our overnight stay – pulling into the public car park nearest to our hotel.



It has a Tesla supercharger station inside it – which was our fallback charging location if we failed to get a charge at IONITY today.



After unpacking our belongings we walked up to our hotel in the town centre.



Using Apple Maps via CarPlay was an interesting experience. It is very capable but has a number of quirks which make us prefer using the native PCM services if possible.

Apple Maps only lets you know the time you'll arrive (and estimated charge) for each next waypoint on the route. It doesn't give you overall distance left – or estimated time of arrival at your destination. We like to keep an eye on those figures to see how we're doing overall – it is not just the next stop that we're interested.

Apple Maps battery charge estimations were very accurate across the day – as good as native PCM. And – of course – it didn't pre-condition the battery so fast-charging is slower if relying on Apple Maps.

Even with the various connectivity services not working – Plug & Charge did work at IONITY – which was great.

Now that we understand the limitations of using the PCM without an active services contract – we'll try and use the PCM as much as possible using its on-board navigation data.

The days charging stats

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
IONITY Lura	33%	99%	60.06	€9.41	41 mins	24	32	DC 350 kW	IONITY

Today we did 275 km over 6:03 hours, with an average speed of 47 km/h, consuming 19.6 kWh/100km.

 

[tigerbalm]

Did you delete your profile in the car or just log out? I deleted mine then added it back. It may amount to the same thing.
Others have reported having to do a factory reset on the pcm which then requires you to re enter your personal setting

Yep, tried everything (logout and delete) – and tried two-finger reset of PCM – but didn't go for the factor reset.

 

[Speuk]

Yep, tried everything (logout and delete) – and tried two-finger reset of PCM – but didn't go for the factor reset.

Factory reset worked for @Fish Fingers but others have reported it didn't work for them and someone else reported theirs just started working again

 

[tigerbalm]

Factory reset worked for @Fish Fingers but others have reported it didn't work for them and someone else reported theirs just started working again

So I decided to walk back to our car and give Factory Reset a try.

But unfortunately no improvement.

What is interesting is that there seems to be "contracts" for nearly everything in the car. I just realised – for example – that charging profiles and timers no longer load (or work). Not something you use on a road-trip – so not an issue at the moment – but a biggie for those who charge at home on cheap night rates.

It is interesting that such basic functionality can even be yanked remotely by Porsche.

My current suspicion – with zero evidence – is that there is some kind of data migration happening – and some users are migrated before others – hence why some seem to be getting back to normal and others are not.

And the logging in process (or maybe even the reset process) causes the PCM to load/use new endpoints where the users data has been moved to.

Just a hunch. I wonder will Porsche ever explain what has happened.

 

[tigerbalm]

After rush hour that Tesla station is much quieter.



Because right-hand drive Taycan's like ours has the DC charging door on the left side of the vehicle – you have to use up two spaces to charge at a Tesla – making it much less viable for us – and only when stations are very quiet.

 

[Speuk]

So I decided to walk back to our car and give Factory Reset a try.

But unfortunately no improvement.

What is interesting is that there seems to be "contracts" for nearly everything in the car. I just realised – for example – that charging profiles and timers no longer load (or work). Not something you use on a road-trip – so not an issue at the moment – but a biggie for those who charge at home on cheap night rates.

It is interesting that such basic functionality can even be yanked remotely by Porsche.

My current suspicion – with zero evidence – is that there is some kind of data migration happening – and some users are migrated before others – hence why some seem to be getting back to normal and others are not.

And the logging in process (or maybe even the reset process) causes the PCM to load/use new endpoints where the users data has been moved to.

Just a hunch. I wonder will Porsche ever explain what has happened.

I agree with your hunch. Shortly after I got my car I lost LTE fir six days. Porsche did say that servers were being upgrades and vehicles moved to new servers...
I hope you get a resolution tomorrow morning!

 

[whitex]

What is interesting is that there seems to be "contracts" for nearly everything in the car. I just realised – for example – that charging profiles and timers no longer load (or work). Not something you use on a road-trip – so not an issue at the moment – but a biggie for those who charge at home on cheap night rates.

It is interesting that such basic functionality can even be yanked remotely by Porsche.

Can you not set timers manually in the car anymore?

 

[tigerbalm]

Can you not set timers manually in the car anymore?

Not currently. It says "A valid license is not currently available" when I touch the Profile or Timer tab in the "Charging" app.

I don't think this is something you'll ever have to subscribe to keep – but something has gone very wonky with the "contract" provisioning on our account.

 

[whitex]

Not currently. It says "A valid license is not currently available" when I touch the Profile or Timer tab in the "Charging" app.

I don't think this is something you'll ever have to subscribe to keep – but something has gone very wonky with the "contract" provisioning on our account.

I don't get why would Porsche tie such basic functionality to depend on a functional cloud.

First, this ties them to have to provide this cloud functionality for decades, unless of course this is the plan, all Porsches stop working after X years for example because Porsche does not want to spend money maintaining cloud servers for X year old cars which bring Porsche zero revenue.

Second, Porsche is not willing (or it doesn't make financial sense) to pay cloud experts to design and run their cloud services with 99.999% uptime. This means the more functionality in the car they tie to the cloud, the more unreliable their cars become.

 

[anonymouse]

Multiple reports on Facebook this morning, hopefully it will be resolved quickly this morning

We all need to write to Porsche and explain to them that running a separately-hosted service status page is an essential ingredient of any cloud service. Too often they have had long server outages and no one — including owners, dealers and their own help desk — knows whether it is a local or a server problem.

 

[anonymouse]

So I decided to walk back to our car and give Factory Reset a try.

Just a word of warning after my OPC did a factory reset on mine recently. It turns out that only a random subset of your parameters are saved with your account — others are defaulted or lost. When the OPC returned my car they didn’t know the vehicle had lost all its auto-raise locations, and gave the car a huge scrape on the way up my drive.

 

[whitex]

We all need to write to Porsche and explain to them that running a separately-hosted service status page is an essential ingredient of any cloud service. Too often they have had long server outages and no one — including owners, dealers and their own help desk — knows whether it is a local or a server problem.

You are assuming Porsche knows this information so they can put it up on a status page. If they knew, they would have probably at least informed their help desk via email or instant message or a memo of some sort. Porsche debug process of customer issues is following the old, antiquated model, go to dealer, dealer do standard debug (search existing bulletins, reset all settings, etc), if problem persists send info to factory, few days later get more questions to answer, etc. This means that the organization doesn't know its servers are down for at least a couple of days.

Had they had a proper cloud service, they could have had better testing, better monitoring. However, Porsche cloud is not a direct revenue generator, so they are unlikely to want to pay for such a robust service. If you are Amazon, or YouTube, or Google, every hour of down time is costing you millions, so they will invest in a robust, fine-nines (99.999%) uptime service with redundancies across geographies, etc. Porsche on the other hand should just design their features for less reliant on the cloud, i.e. if cloud is messed up or cannot be reached, car defaults to fully usable "cloudless" state.

 

[tigerbalm]

This polaroid looks like it was taken in the early 90s – but it is actually your intrepid road-trippers tonight – taken by a local bar that snaps their patrons on an ancient looking instant camera. It took about five minutes for the picture to "develop" and appear.

Sometimes analog is more fun!

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