Has anyone noticed connectivity issues with Porsche Connect App in the UK

[Midlifecrisis]

OPC did mention that I wasn’t the only Taycan owner who had contacted them but the others had all come back online after a week or so. Maybe a problem for me because mobile reception where I live is not great but it is fine where I park at work. I am particularly annoyed with the bad advice from the Porsche connect helpline

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[anonymouse]

An update on my complaint to Porsche UK about the long outages in the back-end service. Not much of an update actually. It would have been nice if they had at least looked at the logs to confirm whether there was an outage. After 11 days in the queue this was their response:

We are continually trying to improve the reliability of our Porsche Connect Services and all feedback is gratefully received. For this reason, I have passed your suggestions onto my colleagues who look after the Smart Mobility and Porsche Connect here in the UK and regularly liaise with Porsche AG, where the server is maintained.

I am unlikely to receive any direct feedback from Porsche AG myself, however I trust you will notice improvements with the service over future updates.

FYI, this is what I sent to them (in case anyone else wants to have a go):

Dear Sir/Madam

Multi-day service outages

There have been several recent incidents when we have lost connectivity between app and Taycan even though both are operating normally and had good signal coverage; and reboots of app and car made no difference. I have confirmed with other owners and our Porsche Centre that others had the same issues for the same duration, and therefore conclude that it was a Porsche outage at the server end or in one of your network/data providers.

The most recent incident prevented us from accessing the car remotely from Friday night to Sunday morning. During this time the app displayed a whirling dot instead of green dot; the battery level was erroneously shown using data from Friday afternoon; we could not pre-cool the car or set direct charging remotely; and we could not create or edit timers. On Sunday c.1040 someone rebooted or fixed something, resulting in spurious alerts in the app, forced re-logins, a spurious message in the car about connecting to account, and eventually normal service.

As I write this it seems another incident may be under way, as I have lost connectivity with the car yet again.

I do not have the data to determine whether these are UK, Europe or worldwide outages, but am confident that multiple (or probably all) UK customers were affected.

A multi-day outage—whether intentional for an upgrade or unintentional due to a failure—is quite a serious loss of service for your customers and is inconsistent with the high quality of the Porsche brand; and as similar failures have happened several times before—for example from 26 to 28 September—I wanted to escalate this to management for some focus please. I have suggested below a number of areas where attention would be helpful: perhaps you could forward this to some senior IT people for their consideration.

Service resilience

First, of course, outages like this should not happen. The service needs redundancy and 24x7 maintenance support to ensure that issues do not arise. Your systems architecture should allow you prepare upgrades offline with only momentary loss of service.

Service monitoring and status reporting

If a failure does happen, it should not take 1-2 days before this is discovered/fixed; and the customer should be kept updated with what is happening.

Best practice is to have:

• Internal 24x7 monitoring so outages are instantly discovered and addressed
• A status page for customers (see vimeostatus.com for an example) which shows current status of all back-end services, and describes any open incidents. Such a page can give us confidence that we don’t have a problem in our individual vehicle, and would limit the number of calls customers have to make to their Porsche Centre etc.
• Notification of outages in both app and website, with a link to the above status page
• A helpdesk which will take customer reports and escalate them rapidly, including by email and on weekends.

I am not confident that all of the above are in place (or working properly) at Porsche today.

App error handling

The Porsche app does not handle server failures well. It waits seemingly endlessly; or it will wait a very long time before giving a message that the server is not responding. Sometimes (eg when setting timers) it will appear that an instruction has been received by the car when it hasn’t.

The app should handle errors better. It should be able to determine within a couple of seconds whether the back-end services are operating, and it should present the user with information about the outage and when normal service will be resumed.

I also note that for this outage even your webpage access to the car was not handled properly: there was no notification of an outage, it just kept trying to connect.

Connection performance

Although unrelated to the main issue above, I should also note that even when the back-end service is healthy, owners are experiencing very slow connection speeds. I think this is due to the architecture of the communications between server and car, but it is quite unhelpful. Sometimes it can take 2-5 minutes for the app to connect and update its data.

Incorrect status while car is being reached

Also while writing can I remind you that there is a well-known and irritating defect in the app: it often displays incorrect status of the vehicle until it connects and updates. So when we open the app it will often show that a window is open, then after a minute it will display the (correct) green tick—but by then the owner has panicked and raced downstairs to close a window if it is raining! Better behaviour would be for all status indications (doors, locks, charge level etc) to be greyed out until the app does actually have the current status.


The Taycan is a fabulous car, but it is necessary for the online services to have the same reliability as the vehicle. I trust some improvements can be made to improve stability and handle error situations better.

 

[Zakirp]

An update on my complaint to Porsche UK about the long outages in the back-end service. Not much of an update actually. And no facts whatsoever - rather lazy of them not to research it I think. After 11 days this was their response:



FYI, this is what I sent to them (in case anyone else wants to have a go):

Hi,
I have been having similar issues, literally just come off the phone to Porsche Centre, they spoke to the master tech, coincidentally they are dealing with a Taycan with the exact same issue as I am having, he informed me they are expecting a software patch from Germany today, hopefully that should sort it, if not they will start replacing the ECU am sure that’s what he said don’t quote me tho.
Seems like they are aware of this issue effecting a small number of people.

I will update this forum once I hear more from them.

 

[anonymouse]

a small number of people.

thanks. It’s hard to do diagnosis by social media crowdsourcing, but my suspicion is that there are two things going on at once:
(1) there were at least two system- or region-wide outages. That’s what my letter was about.
(2)some of us additionally have a more general connectivity deterioration. For example in my case it is now always intermittent, the solid green dot rarely if ever makes an appearance, and some functions don’t work. I will be sending my car in to the OPC for a few things including that shortly.

One of the reasons in my letter I was pushing for a publicly visible status page is to help us separate individual-car issues from central service failures.

 

[Tooney]

For people having "app connectivity" problems, does the PCM show the LTE symbol, meaning Taycan has working cellular datacomm link, or does PCM show the symbol below meaning no cellular datacomm for the car?

 

[anonymouse]

For people having "app connectivity" problems, does the PCM show the LTE symbol,

not only is mine consistently showing LTE but with some hidden three-dots menu you can get signal strength which is quite healthy:

 

[Zakirp]

not only is mine consistently showing LTE but with some hidden three-dots menu you can get signal strength which is quite healthy:

Mine is showing exactly the same

 

[Tooney]

@anonymouse & @Zakirp
1. Can you remote access your Taycan from the myporsche website?
2. When you attempt to use remote access from the app, do you get any error messages on the app (or on the website)?

 

[anonymouse]

@anonymouse & @Zakirp
1. Can you remote access your Taycan from the myporsche website?
2. When you attempt to use remote access from the app, do you get any error messages on the app (or on the website)?

It's an interesting test and I will do it some more at times of future failure.

During what we think was a systemwide outage, the website could not access the vehicle; the app either waited endlessly or gave an error box saying it could not contact the server.

During what I think is a more vehicle-specific outage, the app has various flaws (status of window shown incorrectly, spinning wheel when we try to turn on air OR timer on the air stuck at 55 minutes, etc). I think the website is working at these times but will experiment further.

There is also some sort of disconnect between the "green dot" and the rest of the app. At the moment for example the vehicle will honk instantly when asked, but the app shows "establishing connection".

 

[Tooney]

To troubleshoot app not connecting, it's important to know whether LTE datacomm is present and what error messages are displayed.
From what I have experienced incorrect window open/door unlocked status is routine/normal for the app/website. I ignore that.
No LTE datacomm in the PCM is more serious.
I don't think spinning wheel at PCM is likely caused by datacomm problem.

 

[Zakirp]

I have not really tried accessing from the website, I do at times get an error on the app "something went wrong" please try again or contact Porsche.

I have also noticed while using apple play, while driving it just freezes that's with LTE active.

Outside my garage it does show LTE ,most of the time, i have noticed the odd occasion where it's showed crossed ie no LTE

I have ordered a 4g LTE extender / repeater not sure whether this will make any difference, currently shows 3 bars on the car esim at home, I feel it's just a process of elimination.

I do have my suspicions on the signal, but struggling with random profiles and timers created with random times.

Someone mentioned the Enode profile is created when using likes of Ovo or Octopus for charging but why random times created for finishing the charge, this could be 2 days ahead, that means the car won't complete it's charge till nearer the time. As you can't connect to the car, you are unable to delete the profiles either unless you physically go to the car and do it, then it automatically appears again both in the car and app, it's madness.

Still waiting on Porsche to get back to me.

I have other cars non Porsche parked in the same place never had issues with connectivity to the apps.

 

[Jeffrey B]

I noticed connectivity issues with my Porsche App last night, , Plugged in the home charger Andersen 2, however the Porsche App would not detect the charger had been plugged in most of the night, hence it would not reflect on the OVO anytime app, the car was fully charged by the morning, but reflected as a direct charge, the charge did not reflect on the OVO app.

Spoke with the dealership this morning whom confirmed issues with Porsche Connect and were working on a solution.

I had same problem in the US

 

[Jeffrey B]

I thought it was maybe signal too, but no issues with our Mercedes EQE or my daughters Tesla Model Y at all.

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