Charging nightmare

AMcA

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New car. First time I used Electrify America, I had trouble getting the car to connect. 32 minute call with EA. Second time now, at an EA station in the middle of nowhere, it will not connect. Forget it. No way. Two different chsrgers, each rebooted twice and the car still refuses to connect. EA says it’s got to be a problem with the car.

Gave up in disgust. The next car in line was a Taycan. It hooked up right away.

Porsche “technical assistance” (don’t ask about the nightmare of getting through to them) had no answers beyond “did you plug the charger into the car?” I reached a guy at the dealership who suggested letting the car sit, locked for st least 15 minutes to let the electronics reboot. But there’s a line of people waiting for the 2/4 working EA chargers.

Meanwhile, there’s a flatbed coming to truck the $172,000 piece of shit to a dealer a couple hundred miles away.

I’m feeling very done with this car. And this company.
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Tsingtao

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New car. First time I used Electrify America, I had trouble getting the car to connect. 32 minute call with EA. Second time now, at an EA station in the middle of nowhere, it will not connect. Forget it. No way. Two different chsrgers, each rebooted twice and the car still refuses to connect. EA says it’s got to be a problem with the car.

Gave up in disgust. The next car in line was a Taycan. It hooked up right away.

Porsche “technical assistance” (don’t ask about the nightmare of getting through to them) had no answers beyond “did you plug the charger into the car?” I reached a guy at the dealership who suggested letting the car sit, locked for st least 15 minutes to let the electronics reboot. But there’s a line of people waiting for the 2/4 working EA chargers.

Meanwhile, there’s a flatbed coming to truck the $172,000 piece of shit to a dealer a couple hundred miles away.

I’m feeling very done with this car. And this company.
That sucks beyond belief! Competent PCNA tech assistance is of course non-existent because Atlanta area McDonalds restaurants have apparently taken the cream of the employment crop, leaving only those who could not pass a drug test to work the Porsche switchboard. I called them a couple weeks ago to ask where the hell my wireless iPhone charging chip was, and after being placed on hold for about 20 minutes received some bullshit non-responsive answer that was read from a cue-card. These people make Direct TV customer service reps look like empathetic geniuses. If you want answers to problems, hop on this forum, there is always someone who knows more than the PCNA tele-robots. IMHO, the real POS in your story is the dealer who sold you the car. No excuse for not making sure that DC fast charging was fully functional.
 
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AMcA

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That sucks beyond belief! Competent PCNA tech assistance is of course non-existent because Atlanta area McDonalds restaurants have apparently taken the cream of the employment crop, leaving only those who could not pass a drug test to work the Porsche switchboard. I called them a couple weeks ago to ask where the hell my wireless iPhone charging chip was, and after being placed on hold for about 20 minutes received some bullshit non-responsive answer that was read from a cue-card. These people make Direct TV customer service reps look like empathetic geniuses. If you want answers to problems, hop on this forum, there is always someone who knows more than the PCNA tele-robots. IMHO, the real POS in your story is the dealer who sold you the car. No excuse for not making sure that DC fast charging was fully functional.
You didn’t get the wireless charger! We didn’t get the electric steering wheel adjuster, or the power charge door ports. But they threw in rear seat seat heaters - which we’ll use a lot since we live in Phoenix, AZ.
I don’t blame the dealer. My guess is this is a big deep in the software. I wonder whether it’s even reproducible. The let the car reboot trick worked, I think. But damn, that’s really Mickey Mouse. And you have to wait at least 15 minutes for it to work.
The big problem: I don’t feel like I can trust the car.
 
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AMcA

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You didn’t get the wireless charger! We didn’t get the electric steering wheel adjuster, or the power charge door ports. But they threw in rear seat seat heaters - which we’ll use a lot since we live in Phoenix, AZ.
I don’t blame the dealer. My guess is this is a big deep in the software. I wonder whether it’s even reproducible. The let the car reboot trick worked, I think. But damn, that’s really Mickey Mouse. And you have to wait at least 15 minutes for it to work.
The big problem: I don’t feel like I can trust the car.
Oh, I forget: we only got one key! Yup. Most expensive car I ever bought only came with one key. Dealer has no idea when the second key will come in.
 
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Tsingtao

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Oh, I forget: we only one key! Yup. Most expensive car I ever bought only came with one key. Dealer has no idea when it’ll come in.
I didn't get my electric steering wheel adjuster either. After talking to the dealer about this "surgical procedure" last week, I am almost afraid to have it done whenever the parts wash ashore. And, my current work-around for manual steering adjustment works pretty well (I just don't let anyone else drive my car!). It is interesting that your car came back to life after the old 15 minute reboot BS. Seems that a lot of people have had that experience. Porsche software engineers should have placed physical CTRL+ALT+DEL buttons under the PCM to facilitate the process! Best advice that I have is to stop by the nearest EA charger and test it a few times. If it fails, repeatedly, keep giving it to the dealer and if he can't fix it after a few more tries let Porsche buy the car back. These little software glitches/missing chips really do suck because the Taycan is otherwise an amazing car.
 
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andrewket

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New car. First time I used Electrify America, I had trouble getting the car to connect. 32 minute call with EA. Second time now, at an EA station in the middle of nowhere, it will not connect. Forget it. No way. Two different chsrgers, each rebooted twice and the car still refuses to connect. EA says it’s got to be a problem with the car.

Gave up in disgust. The next car in line was a Taycan. It hooked up right away.

Porsche “technical assistance” (don’t ask about the nightmare of getting through to them) had no answers beyond “did you plug the charger into the car?” I reached a guy at the dealership who suggested letting the car sit, locked for st least 15 minutes to let the electronics reboot. But there’s a line of people waiting for the 2/4 working EA chargers.

Meanwhile, there’s a flatbed coming to truck the $172,000 piece of shit to a dealer a couple hundred miles away.

I’m feeling very done with this car. And this company.
There is a software update that solves a problem with some EA chargers that manifests as you described.
 

daveo4EV

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New car. First time I used Electrify America, I had trouble getting the car to connect. 32 minute call with EA. Second time now, at an EA station in the middle of nowhere, it will not connect. Forget it. No way. Two different chsrgers, each rebooted twice and the car still refuses to connect. EA says it’s got to be a problem with the car.

Gave up in disgust. The next car in line was a Taycan. It hooked up right away.

Porsche “technical assistance” (don’t ask about the nightmare of getting through to them) had no answers beyond “did you plug the charger into the car?” I reached a guy at the dealership who suggested letting the car sit, locked for st least 15 minutes to let the electronics reboot. But there’s a line of people waiting for the 2/4 working EA chargers.

Meanwhile, there’s a flatbed coming to truck the $172,000 piece of shit to a dealer a couple hundred miles away.

I’m feeling very done with this car. And this company.
yeah - you should test the fast charging locally before relying on it during a trip - it could be a simple warranty issue - like the one I had with my new gas car once that fuel tank meter was "off" and the car kept thinking it was out of gas even when the tank was full…which caused all sorts of problems until they fixed it under warranty.

sorry for your troubles - the next owner will love the car and you can move on to something else with a far better vendor, because porsche is the _ONLY_ vendor that sucks when it comes to dealing with vehicle problems - all the others are across the board vastly better and not at all infuriating or clueless. Also their phone customer support is well trained, perfect and always fixes the problems remotely since they have vast knowledge of all the 10's of 1000's of technical problems that can occur on any modern vehicle.

you'll be much much happier with other vendors - it's a guarantee …
 
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AMcA

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I didn't get my electric steering wheel adjuster either. After talking to the dealer about this "surgical procedure" last week, I am almost afraid to have it done whenever the parts wash ashore. And, my current work-around for manual steering adjustment works pretty well (I just don't let anyone else drive my car!). It is interesting that your car came back to life after the old 15 minute reboot BS. Seems that a lot of people have had that experience. Porsche software engineers should have placed physical CTRL+ALT+DEL buttons under the PCM to facilitate the process! Best advice that I have is to stop by the nearest EA charger and test it a few times. If it fails, repeatedly, keep giving it to the dealer and if he can't fix it after a few more tries let Porsche buy the car back. These little software glitches/missing chips really do suck because the Taycan is otherwise an amazing car.
Oh yes, if they can’t fix it, they’ve got a Lemon Law problem on their hands.
 


kort

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There is a software update that solves a problem with some EA chargers that manifests as you described.
this is the answer.
the OP doesn't say what car he has and how it is equipped.
he could have one of the cars affected by the baked in software issues that came with the on board 19.2 kw charger.
many of us had similar charging issues and were ignored by Porsche because of their policy of not recognizing an issue until it can be replicated by their poorly trained techs.
somehow one user was able to replicate the issue and porsche finally addressed the problem.
I suffered for months with this problem, had the local tech try to replicate the issue without success.

I am surprised that some of the well respected users who insisted that the problem was user error haven't chimed in
[edit]
one did chime in with a condescending remark, thanks
 

kort

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You didn’t get the wireless charger! We didn’t get the electric steering wheel adjuster, or the power charge door ports. But they threw in rear seat seat heaters - which we’ll use a lot since we live in Phoenix, AZ.
I don’t blame the dealer. My guess is this is a big deep in the software. I wonder whether it’s even reproducible. The let the car reboot trick worked, I think. But damn, that’s really Mickey Mouse. And you have to wait at least 15 minutes for it to work.
The big problem: I don’t feel like I can trust the car.
there is a software fix, scroll through some of the many threads that discuss the issue and have the fix #, then go to the dealership and demand the software update.
one easy way to diagnose this is if your plug and charge can be enabled.

lastly if you cannot get a charge at an EA unit seek out another charger station like chargepoint or EVGO and the car should take a charge. I had to do that numerous times until porsche finally devised a fix for the issue.
you are correct about the phone support. they are 100% USELESS.
 

Jhenson29

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I am surprised that some of the well respected users who insisted that the problem was user error haven't chimed in
I’m not aware of anyone saying it was user error. Rather, I think the blame was placed on EA. FWIW, from my understanding, the issue still technically lies with EA, and the “fix” from Porsche is a work-around for the EA issue.

And all of your belly-aching about the 19.2kW hindering non-P&C charging at the time was still wrong at the time.

Since many people complain about issues related to EA and you couldn’t produce any evidence or reason why you thought your issues were unique to the 19.2kW charger, your claims were not valid at the time. Proof after the fact is irrelevant because how you got to your conclusion at the time was wrong.
 

kort

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And all of your belly-aching about the 19.2kW hindering non-P&C charging at the time was still wrong at the time.

Since many people complain about issues related to EA and you couldn’t produce any evidence or reason why you thought your issues were unique to the 19.2kW charger, your claims were not valid at the time. Proof after the fact is irrelevant because how you got to your conclusion at the time was wrong.
is that so? i
f the problem wasn't related to the the software conflict baked into the cars with the 19.2 charger onboard what exactly was that patch that porsche finally applied supposed to fix?


my charging issues were 100% related to the software conflict caused by the charging and my diagnosis was fairly spot on.
 

Jhenson29

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if the problem wasn't related to the the software conflict baked into the cars with the 19.2 charger onboard what exactly was that patch that porsche finally applied supposed to fix?
Just because Porsche applies a patch to fix the issue doesn’t mean it was their problem in the first place.

I don’t know anymore about it other than what’s been reported in this forum, but what was reported here was that it was an EA issue. From the original post:


As it turns out, EA uses at least 3 different brands of charger hardware. One of the newer chargers is from Signet, and the root of the issue is that the CP duty cycle % from these chargers is higher than normal and thus considered out-of-range by the Taycan, which would in turn refuse to connect. (Some light reading on J1772 here)

Some, including me, suspected that the missing Plug & Charge "feature" was somehow related, but as it turns out it was not.
I’ve been in situations where the actual issue lies with another party, but I had to put in a patch to correct it on my end.

Just recently, I was integrating with a vendor and their main drive would trip out on over-voltage if we dropped our speed reference. We had integrated with them the same way before without issue. Well, now, apparently, they had removed their minimum decel rate and caused this issue. And they couldn’t fix it because they didn’t know how to put it back. So, I had to add an output filter to provide a minimum decel rate from our system. But the issue is really theirs and if something else after our system causes the reference to drop, the drive will still trip (which is why they should have fixed the root cause of the problem, which was not having a minimum decel rate sized for the load and braking resistors).

And probably anyone who’s worked in software has had to patch things on their end to work with issues in 3rd party libraries.

So, the fact that Porsche added a patch is not proof that it was their problem.

my diagnosis was fairly spot on.
But you had no basis for your “diagnosis” other than it didn’t work, just like numerous other people with general issues at EA. You were lucky. Not right.

I asked you directly at the time for what proof you had. Crickets. And now you want to swoop in and claim this “victory”?? lol. Whatever.
 

kort

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Just because Porsche applies a patch to fix the issue doesn’t mean it was their problem in the first place.

I don’t know anymore about it other than what’s been reported in this forum, but what was reported here was that it was an EA issue. From the original post:




I’ve been in situations where the actual issue lies with another party, but I had to put in a patch to correct it on my end.

Just recently, I was integrating with a vendor and their main drive would trip out on over-voltage if we dropped our speed reference. We had integrated with them the same way before without issue. Well, now, apparently, they had removed their minimum decel rate and caused this issue. And they couldn’t fix it because they didn’t know how to put it back. So, I had to add an output filter to provide a minimum decel rate from our system. But the issue is really theirs and if something else after our system causes the reference to drop, the drive will still trip (which is why they should have fixed the root cause of the problem, which was not having a minimum decel rate sized for the load and braking resistors).

And probably anyone who’s worked in software has had to patch things on their end to work with issues in 3rd party libraries.

So, the fact that Porsche added a patch is not proof that it was their problem.


But you had no basis for your “diagnosis” other than it didn’t work, just like numerous other people with general issues at EA. You were lucky. Not right.

I asked you directly at the time for what proof you had. Crickets. And now you want to swoop in and claim this “victory”?? lol. Whatever.
the bottom line is that you really don't know what you are talking about
 
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AMcA

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Me, I don’t care whose fault it is. Porsche is a systems integrator. If something closely associated with their vehicle, like their official charging network, doesn’t work it’s Porsche’s responsibility to fix it.
We got to Palm Springs, and went to the dealer there. They did some software updates (which, in this day s as bd age, oughta be automatic). It worked on the dealer’s Level 2 charger. We’ll try it on an EA charger before we take out across the desert again.
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