And therein lays the issue. Hyundai sells much higher volume of cars, which results in a much higher budget for software development. Unless Porsche can leverage VW software, it's going to be lagging forever. Software is very expensive to develop, qualify, ship.
I’m with gnop1950 regarding the software. I have no software complaints since the Taycan software does everything I think it needs to do. I appreciate the iPhone app which lets meI'm really not getting the software complaints. Personally, I don't have any major gripes about the software and only a few minor ones. It does everything I expect a car's software to do. My, admittedly limited, experience with Tesla's left me unimpressed with the software I found it irritating to do everything on the iPad glued to the dash.
Yes, my iPad does many things better than my Porsche software, but then I use it for entirely different purposes.
Maybe, as a software engineer with over 40 years of experience, my expectations are different from the average driver
I don't do many road trips and most of my charging is done at home so I'm sure that colors my perception. Hopefully, the planned changes to the EV charging infrastructure and opening of the Super Charger network will alleviate some of the road-tripping issues.
I do a lot through CarPlay including route planning and even opening/closing my garage doors so maybe that makes a difference as well.
Without getting too deep into the weeds. Here's one shortcoming. Why doesn't the Taycan talk to the house WiFi? I live in an area of weak cell signal and in the garage the car is dead communication wise. I can't initiate charging, nor preconditioning the HVAC, nor send a route to the car, nor anything. Why did Porsche insist on routing everything through their servers, especially considering that said servers seem to have intermittent problems communicating? LTE reception is not a Taycan strong point and routing everything through the Porsche servers isn't doing us any favor. I wont even start on the shortcomings with road trip/charging planning. Why can't the car be "a REAL drivers car" and also have a state of the art software? It's a Porsche. It should do everything competently.
Unless you have owned a Tesla, you just don't know what you're missing. For example, something as simple as walk-away lock (missing in a Taycan), not having to press a button to start/stop the car, car locking whenever you press "lock" on the remote (or just walk away) - Taycan does it 95% of the time, the other 5% I have to open the door and press the power button before it lets me lock, similar when I get it, most of the time it starts by itself, but not every time. Other examples include the ability to close the trunk from the remote and/or not have to stand there watching it close while rain is falling on my head (taycan trunk will stop closing if I walk away while it's closing), when hill-hold or manouvering assist stop engages, with a Tesla you just hit the brake again and can let off slowly to start moving - Taycan you have to hit the accelerator, which is risky if the car stopped because you are only inches from an object away and you only want to move an inch closer. Tesla app is way better, it gives you real time information like location, temperature, etc - with Taycan it's always some cached value, some information not even there (like current car temperature - is the car preheated yet?) and for example I've stopped counting how often MyPorsche tells me my Taycan has open windows (when it doesn't). With a Tesla, you literally just keep the key fob (or phone) on you and you get-in, drive, get out, walk away - nothing to remember to click, the car will lock, unlock, start itself. My wife actually commented on this earlier, as she switched out from a Model S to an eTron - "Tesla was so much easier, you just got into it and drove". Generally, Tesla interface is intuitive to people of all ages, Taycan takes reading the manual or asking others on forums. Oh, let's not forget the Taycan locking me out of the app almost every time I road trip - APp says the car is in privacy mode, so I cannot pre-cool or pre-heat it when coming back from a hike for example, I get to the car, it's not in privacy mode. Problem usually resolves itself, but not for a few hours.
I hear they allow that in Russia. The rest of the world has to pay Porsche a monthly subscription. Allowing WiFi would allow people to not pay Porsche, but use their own hotspot instead.
I can see how you can claim the trunk not closing when I walk away , or the fact that I cannot close it from the remote, is due to some overly paranoid safety restriction. But car not allowing me to lock it, even when I hit the lock on the remote seems opposite of paranoid - is it really safer if I click LOCK and the car stays unlocked while parked somewhere while I'm away from it? How is it safer? I remember being stuck in a snow storm trying to lock my Taycan for a few minutes, gave up, went to warm up, came out for another few minutes to finally get it to lock. How is it safer to fake out my app into saying the car is in privacy mode, while it is not - are you saying the car has decided it's been stolen and it's trying to prevent vigilante justice, preventing me from finding it? How overly paternalistic approach from Porsche.It’s disappointing that, having met some of these folks, and discussed the matter in person, the “better” comparisons persist. @daveo4EV and @whitex i know you know better - it’s not lack of skills, it’s an UX philosophy. It’d be trivial to do any of the things you enumerated in both your emails, and I’m sure you can find the reason Porsche have decided not to without much effort.
FWIW, I worked on a team that produced the BR DVD stack for the S Klasse MB launched at the end of the Noughts. We were subcontracted by Harman, who was doing the entire in-car “entertainment” (all UX, essentially) for MB. The specs - level of detail and precision, as well as the requirements themselves - were on par, if not better, than the best you would have seen in your own companies, and far better than the norm. For German auto mfrs - and I’m sure for others, too - software is extremely constrained, and designed for the worst case/to fail safely. There will be bugs, of course, the pace of changes will be slow, and “when in doubt, there is no doubt”. Hence no home WiFi (the only authority the car trusts is the P service), stopping closing when the key goes out of range, the hiccups with closing/unlocking of doors etc. It’s a choice, and it’s a lazy accusation to claim it’s incompetence.
I think your no home WiFi justification is also stretching it - in this day and age, any competent cloud developer can secure connectivity - there are protocols, processes, even ready to buy and use code. I would claim Porsche trusting a collection of cellular providers around the world with securing their car communications is a much less secure move than doing an end-to-end secure comms. It's not like Porsche doesn't already have exposed WiFi available for hackers (Apple CarPlay, Hotspot, Wireless Android Auto). I also seriously doubt every one of the cellular providers they use actually guarantees secure tunnel to Porsche servers and nothing else (remember the famous complete remote control takeover from the open internet Jeep hack, yes Chrysler tried blaming it on Sprint, but the result was Sprint was not liable, so Porsche should know better). Another one, the charging user interface, do you really think they designed the interface at all? It mirrors the darn ISO 15118 API's! It would be like implementing loading/saving a file by adding a button "Open File", which would pop up a dialog with "read/write/append" mode choice, then a separate button for "Write Data", perhaps a popup for block size, then a 3rd button for "Close File". To me it shows a lack of end-to-end user experience design, not some paranoia over safety concerns. How is the backup camera with flashy 3D view safer than just a clear backup camera, perhaps side view separately? Turns out some Taycan's actually have "curb view", but not mine because I paid Porsche extra. Side note, my wife has an audi with a similar system, it actually works a little better because a) you can make the overhead view full screen and b) her car is taller so the cameras are higher, making for a better view - still not great, but much better than the Taycan, in which the backup camera, 3D views, etc are useless when driving within a foot of any objects taller than a curb. How it is safer for me to receive audi and popup notifications while driving every time the PCM loads the next chunk of the map? How is it that they lock out the keyboard while driving, or reading of text messages, but still pop up notifications advertising Taycan features???) of the design in lieu of other benefits, but someone like my wife who just wants the car to be a reliable transportation, the German software is lacking (she is seriously considering getting rid of the eTron after just a few weeks). Cars should be designed for people to use, and no car will be 100% safe - the safest car is a bricked car in your garage, least likely to hurt anyone, but useless to most people (all but people who want a car just to show off in their garage).
