Mark
Active Member
- First Name
- Mark
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2020
- Threads
- 0
- Messages
- 26
- Reaction score
- 21
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Vehicles
- Taycan 4S
Please report this failure to NHTSA. Then, demand your dealer investigate/apply the potential fix below if they try to suggest they’ve never heard of this problem.You can add me with my 2021 Taycan Turbo to the list. I was driving on an Interstate highway and saw the "Engine Control Error" message and advised to find a place to park. The car began decelerating and would not respond to pressing the accelerator pedal. An exit was coming up so I managed to get onto that exit and roll through the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp so that I was half in and half off the shoulder. The car wouldn't move forward or do anything other than continue with the air conditioning (thankfully).
I contacted Porsche through the Breakdown call button on the PCM and they arranged for a towing service to come get the car and take me to the nearby dealership (20 minutes away). It took 3 hours for that to happen. I contacted the dealership in the meantime to see whether they could get me a loaner car or even a ride home. "No" on both.
After 90 minutes, the car turned itself off while we waited for that towing service and I turned it back on to be able to use the air conditioning. It came back on and the message cleared. I was tempted to try driving it to the dealership but I was in a relatively safe place and didn't know whether the car would become un-drivable again, this time perhaps with even a worse safety outcome.
One interesting outcome, though, was that I had the opportunity to test the Taycan battery drain if stopped but operating the air conditioning. Over a little more than 2 hours in the direct sunlight with the outside air temperature of 94-95 F and the "feels like" temperature of just over 100 F. I kept the air conditioning set to keep the car at 71 F. I operated the other controls (like radio and telephone) during that time. The battery charge level dropped a consistent 1% every 25 minutes. I think we can assume this is about the worst case normal situation. So, if you stopped when you were at, say, 70% battery charge, you could stay with everything operating for about 29 hours.
I'll also take a look at the NHTSA website to see about reporting a safety problem.
Besides being able to do nothing to help me in any way whatsoever, the Porsche dealership (Porsche of Hilton Head) says they can't even look at the car for a week so I am without a car with nobody caring in the least. The only worse customer service I've ever had with a car company was with Tesla.
I called my service advisor to try and preemptively apply this patch. He initially agreed as he was well aware of the issue and then realized because there is not an official recall yet, there is no Porsche policy to apply this patch unless I’ve actually experienced the issue. I pointed out the obvious liability issues if something happens to me due to this issue which he understood. So, he’s trying to find a solution but rest assured I’m not going to give up until I get this patch installed on my car.
https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/threads/motor-control-error-fix-2021.5336/