WalterG
Well-Known Member
- First Name
- Walter
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2020
- Threads
- 18
- Messages
- 112
- Reaction score
- 168
- Location
- Boston
- Vehicles
- Taycan4S
- Thread starter
- #1
Yesterday I did the return trip from Durham to Boston – 721 miles over 14 hours. The Taycan is such a great long distance driver! It was me, my wife and two trunks full of luggage. Weather was about 30F departing Durham (6am) and about 55F when arriving in Boston. I have a 4S with 20” all seasons. Warning, this is kind of long lol.
The Taycan is the best car I’ve ever owned hands down. Like all “loved ones” however it’s got its share of quirks and the more time you spend together the more you get to know them. Doesn’t change how I feel about the Taycan so when the software did something weird we just wrote it off as Taycan being quirky
The EA chargers worked much better for us this time. On the trip from Boston to Durham, we never got a charge rate over 150kw. On the return leg, we had 3 of the 4 charges over 150kw. There were two notable differences – (1) about 30 min prior to arriving at the target EA charger, we stopped the navigation and selected the target EA charger through the “Porsche Charging Service” POI section of the nav and (2) we arrived at the chargers below 20% charge.
These were both suggestions posted by @wemct (https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/t...aycan-tips-suggestions.4072/page-2#post-56030)
and really make a big difference. By selecting the target charger through the Porsche Charging Service nav menu, Taycan preconditions the battery. In range mode I noticed the battery temp increase after selecting the charger. This really stood out in our first leg of the trip between Durham and Richmond when the battery was still cold. The battery was 61F after driving about 2 hours in range mode. During that 30 min after we put the target EA charger into the nav, the battery temp increased from 61F to 83F and then the charger started out at a whopping 247kw and the total charge there from 9% to 83% only took 22 min .
On the negative side for EA, we had two chargers where the charge rate started out really low and we had to move. At the Walmart EA in Abingdon, MD, the first 350 started at only 65kw. We moved to the second 350 and it ran at 189kw before tapering. At the Walmart EA in East Brunswick the 350 charger started at 59kw. We moved to a 150 and that worked at 120kw. I spoke with EA support and they said the car was handshaking at 75kw for those so maybe there’s a hardware issue or the software for the handshake isn’t robust enough yet. Looking forward to this continuing to get better.
One thing I noticed in the 10 EA stops we made in the past week is that the 150 chargers always got a charge rate close to 150kw, while the 350’s sometimes got a very low rate (like below 75kw). I think that my charging algorithm now will be that if I arrive at an EA location with above 20% SOC, I’ll just go straight to a 150 since even the 350’s are going to charge close to a 150kw rate anyway with that SOC and the 150kw stations seem to be more reliable in their handshake. If I arrive below 20% SOC, I’ll try the 350’s since there is enough upside to make it worth trying them. I’m looking forward to seeing how the MY20 software updates helps with this.
We mostly ran in range mode, but I decided to drive about 300 miles in Sport+. There was a long stretch on the Jersey turnpike (express lanes) and a stretch on the Mass Pike where traffic was moving fast, the road conditions were good and I wanted to enjoy some spirited driving. The car feels so well planted and is so responsive in Sport+ it was really an enjoyable stretch of driving. Wow!
Driving in Sport+ brings the battery temp down quickly. I noticed that in Range mode the battery temp stayed high after charging so I started running in Normal mode for about 30 min after fast charging to bring the battery temp down some. I doubt that’s needed but maybe it is “nicer” on the battery. It seemed to come down even faster in Sport+ mode. Not a scientific study by any means but just seemed to me to be the case.
Our driving style was faster on this trip from Durham to Boston vs our trip a week ago from Boston to Durham and we could tell in the consumption. Even with the Sport+ driving, we got 34.8kw/100 miles consumption which isn’t bad. On the way to Durham with much more conservative driving style and running almost entirely in Range mode we got 31.5kw/100 miles. We shaved about 30 min off our total drive time on this trip though and had a bit more fun. Traffic was about the same so I think it is mainly that we drove faster and were able to get a higher charge rate on 3 of the charging stops.
Some other misc things:
- Speaking of quirks…the speed limit sign got stuck on the display. At some point it displayed 55mph and just didn’t change the rest of the trip. It was actually worse than that because we had it set to warn when we are over the speed limit so the 55mph sign had the red outline indicating that we are over the limit. I’m sure we could have rebooted the PCM to clear it but we lived it for the trip. My wife liked to point out that I broke the speed limit warning haha.
- The right front passenger tire pressure was about 1-2psi higher than the left after an EA charging session. I think what’s happening is the right front wheel well warms the tire and that increases the pressure a little during fast charging. It normalized within about 10 min of driving and was only really noticeable when it was cold out so the driver side tire cooled while the passenger side warmed.
-Range mode should have an option for stiffer suspension. Raising the height one notch while in Range mode helps a lot (thanks to @Christian J for that hint) to prevent the car from bottoming out. However, I would really like an option to make the suspension stiffer too.
- After trying a lot of different apps, we found that we used Plug Share the most to find the next charger. We started a “trip” in Plug Share and then set the range we are looking to go (in our case we targeted about 165 – 200 miles) and it shows the charging options along the route at that distance. When we identified the charger we wanted, we put it in the Porsche nav and into Google maps as a backup. We really like ABRP but this approach gave us more ability to choose the EA stop we wanted to make.
Here are the details:
Since we didn’t have a place to plug in at our destination, we started at 6am from Durham at 85% SOC, but with a cold battery of 55F.
The Taycan is the best car I’ve ever owned hands down. Like all “loved ones” however it’s got its share of quirks and the more time you spend together the more you get to know them. Doesn’t change how I feel about the Taycan so when the software did something weird we just wrote it off as Taycan being quirky
The EA chargers worked much better for us this time. On the trip from Boston to Durham, we never got a charge rate over 150kw. On the return leg, we had 3 of the 4 charges over 150kw. There were two notable differences – (1) about 30 min prior to arriving at the target EA charger, we stopped the navigation and selected the target EA charger through the “Porsche Charging Service” POI section of the nav and (2) we arrived at the chargers below 20% charge.
These were both suggestions posted by @wemct (https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/t...aycan-tips-suggestions.4072/page-2#post-56030)
and really make a big difference. By selecting the target charger through the Porsche Charging Service nav menu, Taycan preconditions the battery. In range mode I noticed the battery temp increase after selecting the charger. This really stood out in our first leg of the trip between Durham and Richmond when the battery was still cold. The battery was 61F after driving about 2 hours in range mode. During that 30 min after we put the target EA charger into the nav, the battery temp increased from 61F to 83F and then the charger started out at a whopping 247kw and the total charge there from 9% to 83% only took 22 min .
On the negative side for EA, we had two chargers where the charge rate started out really low and we had to move. At the Walmart EA in Abingdon, MD, the first 350 started at only 65kw. We moved to the second 350 and it ran at 189kw before tapering. At the Walmart EA in East Brunswick the 350 charger started at 59kw. We moved to a 150 and that worked at 120kw. I spoke with EA support and they said the car was handshaking at 75kw for those so maybe there’s a hardware issue or the software for the handshake isn’t robust enough yet. Looking forward to this continuing to get better.
One thing I noticed in the 10 EA stops we made in the past week is that the 150 chargers always got a charge rate close to 150kw, while the 350’s sometimes got a very low rate (like below 75kw). I think that my charging algorithm now will be that if I arrive at an EA location with above 20% SOC, I’ll just go straight to a 150 since even the 350’s are going to charge close to a 150kw rate anyway with that SOC and the 150kw stations seem to be more reliable in their handshake. If I arrive below 20% SOC, I’ll try the 350’s since there is enough upside to make it worth trying them. I’m looking forward to seeing how the MY20 software updates helps with this.
We mostly ran in range mode, but I decided to drive about 300 miles in Sport+
. There was a long stretch on the Jersey turnpike (express lanes) and a stretch on the Mass Pike where traffic was moving fast, the road conditions were good and I wanted to enjoy some spirited driving. The car feels so well planted and is so responsive in Sport+ it was really an enjoyable stretch of driving. Wow!Driving in Sport+ brings the battery temp down quickly. I noticed that in Range mode the battery temp stayed high after charging so I started running in Normal mode for about 30 min after fast charging to bring the battery temp down some. I doubt that’s needed but maybe it is “nicer” on the battery. It seemed to come down even faster in Sport+ mode. Not a scientific study by any means but just seemed to me to be the case.
Our driving style was faster on this trip from Durham to Boston vs our trip a week ago from Boston to Durham and we could tell in the consumption. Even with the Sport+ driving, we got 34.8kw/100 miles consumption which isn’t bad. On the way to Durham with much more conservative driving style and running almost entirely in Range mode we got 31.5kw/100 miles. We shaved about 30 min off our total drive time on this trip though and had a bit more fun. Traffic was about the same so I think it is mainly that we drove faster and were able to get a higher charge rate on 3 of the charging stops.
Some other misc things:
- Speaking of quirks…the speed limit sign got stuck on the display. At some point it displayed 55mph and just didn’t change the rest of the trip. It was actually worse than that because we had it set to warn when we are over the speed limit so the 55mph sign had the red outline indicating that we are over the limit. I’m sure we could have rebooted the PCM to clear it but we lived it for the trip. My wife liked to point out that I broke the speed limit warning haha.
- The right front passenger tire pressure was about 1-2psi higher than the left after an EA charging session. I think what’s happening is the right front wheel well warms the tire and that increases the pressure a little during fast charging. It normalized within about 10 min of driving and was only really noticeable when it was cold out so the driver side tire cooled while the passenger side warmed.
-Range mode should have an option for stiffer suspension. Raising the height one notch while in Range mode helps a lot (thanks to @Christian J for that hint) to prevent the car from bottoming out. However, I would really like an option to make the suspension stiffer too.
- After trying a lot of different apps, we found that we used Plug Share the most to find the next charger. We started a “trip” in Plug Share and then set the range we are looking to go (in our case we targeted about 165 – 200 miles) and it shows the charging options along the route at that distance. When we identified the charger we wanted, we put it in the Porsche nav and into Google maps as a backup. We really like ABRP but this approach gave us more ability to choose the EA stop we wanted to make.
Here are the details:
Since we didn’t have a place to plug in at our destination, we started at 6am from Durham at 85% SOC, but with a cold battery of 55F.
| Location | Arrival SOC | Arrival Battery Temp | Departure SOC | Depart Battery Temp | Charging Rate / Time |
| Walmart EA Richmond, VA 350kw charger | 9% | 83F | 83% | 108F | 247kw / 22min |
| Walmart EA Abingdon, MD 350kw charger | 21% | 88F | 91% | 100F | 189kw / 37min (including move to 2nd charger) |
| Walmart EA East Brunswick, NJ 150kw charger | 36% | 85F | 74% | 100F | 120kw / 35min (including move to 2nd charger) |
| Walmart EA Manchester, CT 350kw charger | 15% | 89F | 75% | 112F | 247kw / 18min |
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