Day after purchasing Taycan 4S Electrical system error and bricked car in the middle of the highway.

[Vim Schrotnock]

I find it really odd that the people that are “almost getting sent off of cliffs” aren’t answering a simple question in regards to steering and brakes.

What would they do in the case of a tire blow out or other mechanical issue?

I can only speak for myself, but I think people who haven’t experienced the problem need to stop positing what it compares to or feels like. From my perspective it was extremely concerning and really had me out of sorts for a few seconds. I was coasting to to a stop behind another car when my car violently shuddered and lost all power. It took me a few seconds to figure out what was going on and what I needed to do. Luckily, I was at a stoplight but I can only imagine if this had happened to me at full speed on a freeway.

i’ve been driving for over 50 years, have multiple race licenses and I’m a certified Porsche track instructor so I would put myself in the category of very experienced when it comes to dealing with automobile issues that occur while moving. I’ve experienced all sorts of problems on the track, and on the public roads and I would rank this the second most concerning incident that I have had on the public roads. The first was when I was driving my 1966 Plymouth Fury and had a rusted control arm drop out of the left front wheel while I was doing 70 miles an hour on the highway.

This is a very serious problem, and comparing this to running out of gas or having a flat tire is ridiculous. I’ve experienced both of those numerous times and they are nothing like what we are talking about here. Plus, if you had a tire manufacturer whose tires were blowing out at this frequency and had 18 reports of blown tires how would you feel about buying a set of those tires?

Fortunately, there does appear to be a fix. But I am waiting to see how Porsche handles this situation. Hopefully they will do what we expect of a company like Porsche.

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[Chris8536]

I find it really odd that the people that are “almost getting sent off of cliffs” aren’t answering a simple question in regards to steering and brakes.

What would they do in the case of a tire blow out or other mechanical issue?

that’s both an unfair and frankly dangerous statement to make to imply I would be lying about this incident. It is real and puts drivers at risk.

In New York you do not likely have roads like highway 1. I was driving between the headlands and Stinson beach going southbound. This is a blind turn cliff side road where you have no shoulders and stopping is extremely dangerous. The car lost power on a hairpin turn and began to shudder violently. Both breaks and steering worked but not normally as the vibration was violent. In a split second, I had to choose between ditching the car in the road where I was around a blind turn or graveling it on a very small side with no railing that continued off a cliff. I graveled the right tires to slow down then turned fully in at the last second before the cliff face and came to a stop.

Please don’t cast doubt on people who report things you don’t like. It’s not fair to those who had to deal with the situation and leads the community into victim blaming.
Porsche NA has now offered what I would call “bribes” (NDAs with cash payouts) to two others that I know in person over these incidents.

Its not a good situation and Porsche is not acting in the right. Blaming or casting blame on the victims of this is also not helpful.

 

[RecoveringGT3Addict]

In New York you do not likely have roads like highway 1.

Being very familiar with 1, this would be one of the absolute most frightening places for this to happen. It could easily end very badly.

 

[DerekS]

Being very familiar with 1, this would be one of the absolute most frightening places for this to happen. It could easily end very badly.

Or 17 down to Santa Cruz, yikes

 

[feye]

I can only speak for myself, but I think people who haven’t experienced the problem need to stop positing what it compares to or feels like. From my perspective it was extremely concerning...

Why exactly?

 

[manitou202]

Imagine the following language in small print on your boarding pass: “The plane you are about to board has experienced occasional loss of power while in flight.

As with all new aircraft, there are inevitable bugs in the software. Savvy passengers understand this and will remain patient while the bugs are ironed out.

There is no need to be concerned, as the pilots have been able to avoid any fatalities by gliding the plane back to safety, accompanied by certain safety precautions such as runway foam.

Our engineers are working on this and there is no reason to be concerned about your safety.

Should you experience a loss of power while in flight, and survive the emergency landing, the airline will compensate you with free tickets for your next trip.

Enjoy your flight!”

Except that, in the case of the Taycans, there isn’t even a printed warning issued by the manufacturer. One must dig through obscure postings on forums such as this one to even learn that the problem exists.

Yes, an airplane losing power while flying is the same as a car losing power on the highway.

Come on guys, we should expect Porsche to take this issue seriously and fix it ASAP. But this over dramatization is ridiculous.

 

[DerekS]

Do we have confirmation that a restart works after one of these episodes?

That's the difference between stranded/not. I am a lot less worried about one of these shutdowns if I can restart the car and get it home. Flatbedding cars is stressful.

 

[Vim Schrotnock]

Why exactly?

Violent shuddering of the car combined with a loss of control - tried to move the car off the road and could not. Scared the crap out of me.

 

[Day1taycan]

Surprised I haven't heard from porsche NA regarding this. I emailed the ceo and SVP and still nothing. Not sure if they are keep silent due to legality but def not what I would have expected.

 

[Day1taycan]

Wow so looks like the repurchase got denied. Still have hardly gotten any explanation except that it might have been a software issue. One of the criteria for repurchase is a critical defect within 20 days of purchase, not sure how car dying on the highway on day after purchase doesn't fit that. Definitely not pleased. Case got escalated to have higher call me directly, so will see how that goes.

 

[RecoveringGT3Addict]

Wow so looks like the repurchase got denied. Still have hardly gotten any explanation except that it might have been a software issue. One of the criteria for repurchase is a critical defect within 20 days of purchase, not sure how car dying on the highway on day after purchase doesn't fit that. Definitely not pleased. Case got escalated to have higher call me directly, so will see how that goes.

If this is as easy to fix as a software update, it might not be considered critical. It will be interesting to watch this unfold...

 

[Chuck J]

PCNA CEO was on Squawk Box yesterday and described that they knew they had the problem, that it was software issue and had a fix ready to be installed. The software update is said to take 90 minutes to apply. I have talked to two dealerships since then and they know nothing about the issue. I called PCNA and they knew nothing also. I am taking my car in Monday for three campaigns but the dealer says there is no recall yet on this issue and that they have not been notified.

My car has been issue free for the ten months I have owned it, but this makes me nervous and the fact that one of the campaigns changes many moduals and reinstalls software is IMHO risky.

Chuck J

 

[Tiredoftesla]

I’ve driven a Model S since 2013. The company is A PAIN IN THE ASS to deal with but the cars are beyond spectacular. It would be impossible for me to ever drive another ICE car. But I was excited to move to the 4S and ordered one. But after reading of all the software issues and the hapless dealer responses, I won’t chance it as we do a lot of road trips. So I’ve cancelled the 4S and ordered a new MS. It’s a lot of car and $40k less.

Fact is that Tesla’s technology is 8 years ahead of everyone else. Sandy Munro, the guy who tears products down, including automobiles (his very profitable company's foremost interest) in order to critique the manufacturing process for their clients has come to the conclusion that Tesla's lead in the foreseeable future is almost insurmountable because they've innovated so well in creating a manufacturing process for EVs whereas VW, GM, Ford, etc. have been held back by their established supply chains that require them to have up to four times as many electrical connections as Tesla. They continue to adapt old in-stock systems to their new cars -- expensive manufacturing, frequent complicated repairs, expensive service. His further findings: The original Model 3 had 140 parts in its rear end that all had to be bolted or welded together. The current Y and future Teslas have a SINGLE huge casting in place of those 140 parts -- orders of magnitude less expensive to manufacture, an order of magnitude less expensive to assemble, and an end result of perfect panel alignment with little or no need to adjust the gaps. No one else has done this because castings that large require heat treatment to give the metal back the integrity it loses in casting, and that invariably alters the shape of the casting. Elon et al. invented a new (patented) aluminum alloy that doesn't require heat treatment. Tesla encountered problems using the Nvidia cpus in their neural-net computers, so they stole from Intel a giant in the field of chip design and created their own CPUs with something like ten times the computing capacity because the thing was made expressly to process the images sent from cameras, radar, and LIDAR. Again, no competitor is doing anything like that. No competitor has used anything but old off-the-shelf compute units and integrated circuits that are not purpose-built. They buy them from manufacturers in their vast, established supply chains and usually require over a hundred of these per car. Tesla Incorporated all those functions into four or five boards with a tiny fraction of the connections. Even in electric motor design, where I thought that European competition might prove deadly for them, Tesla still has the most efficient motors (= longer range) in the business.

Munro says it'll take the rest of the industry 5-8 years to catch up to where Tesla is in 2021, and by that time, Tesla will be in 2029.

Bottom line: on paper, the Taycan is the best EV in the world. But on the road, Tesla beats the wheels off it.

 

[element]

another troll

 

[epirali]

Bottom line: on paper, the Taycan is the best EV in the world. But on the road, Tesla beats the wheels off it.

As someone who knows both cars extremely well (and actually owns/driven them) I will simply say: no, no it doesn’t. Whatever else you may think of Tesla, like it, own it, etc, it simply is false that it beats the Taycan in ANY metric except for range and you know, making fart noises.

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