Porsche Connect App rant

[Skystorm]

How long did it take you guys for the Porsche Connect to be activated? We did all the steps at the dealership but after 4 days my online profile and app still show “pending activation”?

Mine Worked Instant..

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[Scandinavian]

How long did it take you guys for the Porsche Connect to be activated? We did all the steps at the dealership but after 4 days my online profile and app still show “pending activation”?

Mine worked from the time the Porsche guy and I set it up When I collected the car

 

[Pjjameso]

How long did it take you guys for the Porsche Connect to be activated? We did all the steps at the dealership but after 4 days my online profile and app still show “pending activation”?

I activated while waiting for finance guy to be free to sign the paperwork. In other words instantly.

 

[Rey1986]

Hmm in other words maybe something went wrong..

 

[jetbox]

How long did it take you guys for the Porsche Connect to be activated? We did all the steps at the dealership but after 4 days my online profile and app still show “pending activation”?

did you fix it?i had the same and seemed to fix it by connecting the phone to the car WiFi hotspot, it could be coincidence but it seemed to configure the connection loop with the car

 

[Rey1986]

did you fix it?i had the same and seemed to fix it by connecting the phone to the car WiFi hotspot, it could be coincidence but it seemed to configure the connection loop with the car

That is what I’m going to try once I get back from Mallorca as I haven’t tried that yet.

 

[cd77]

I think many of the connection issues here (certainly not all) are caused by server issues, ie neither the app, nor the car are at fault.
Until May I had an Audi e-tron and the very same issues. It turned out that all brands of the VW group seem to use the same system for remote control of the car. Therefore, customers of all brands face the same troubles.
and with electrification the significance of the app to monitor charging and remote control the aircon is rising. And the server infrastructure seems not to be able to cope with the increased usage by EV drivers.
This situation seems to persist for months or even years. Why they don’t get a grip on it I have no clue...

 

[kmcdonal]

I think many of the connection issues here (certainly not all) are caused by server issues, ie neither the app, nor the car are at fault.
Until May I had an Audi e-tron and the very same issues. It turned out that all brands of the VW group seem to use the same system for remote control of the car. Therefore, customers of all brands face the same troubles.
and with electrification the significance of the app to monitor charging and remote control the aircon is rising. And the server infrastructure seems not to be able to cope with the increased usage by EV drivers.
This situation seems to persist for months or even years. Why they don’t get a grip on it I have no clue...

I couldn't get Porsche Connect to activate for the first 10 days but I finally got it to work yesterday. On the first 10 days with the car I would see a message like "SIM card invalid" or something like that. Yesterday I got in and noticed that I was not getting that error so I tried to activate Porsche Connect and it worked.

 

[TK-421]

I have been going back-and-forth between my dealer and Porsche Connect for over a week. Porsche Connect has indicated to me that they have had system wide server issues for the last week. I was told yesterday that the issues should be resolved by the middle of next week. The only service that currently works for me is the charging (and that only started working Thursday), the rest of the services indicate activation is being processed.

 

[awharton]

Wow. Staggered by the amount of issues. Just hope I don’t get as many when mine arrives next week.

How can Porsche design such a great car but have such an appalling software development team.

 

[porsche_coyote]

Wow. Staggered by the amount of issues. Just hope I don’t get as many when mine arrives next week.

How can Porsche design such a great car but have such an appalling software development team.

<Begin Rant>Essentially no automakers (with the possible exception of Tesla) actually understand software. Some have begun to awaken to the notion that the in-car software is a potential goldmine, but they're all at various stages of royally screwing up, thanks in part to the fact that they consistently fail to put their major software platform initiatives in the hands of people who know and care about software.

A few of them know they have a problem, but NONE of them appear to have actually figured out both the problem and a clear path to a solution. Electrification is only tangentially related to this, BTW. All cars have huge amounts of software in them today (particularly as CAN and VAN system replaced old-fashioned wiring, since everything in your car--from a window switch to a windshield wiper motor-- is basically a networked device with a microcontroller), but most of it is running as firmware at the component level, and is written by outside suppliers. And next to none of it surfaces to the end user.

A problem at this level will require a holistic solution. I had tiny hopes for VW group when they announced their intention to build their own platform, but when they threw thousands of engineers at it right away, I knew they had a huge problem. This requires a fundamentally new approach, and I suspect that a handful of really talented (and yes, expensive) engineers could make more progress than the human wave that VW is throwing at it.

I think that unfortunately most of the legacy automakers will need to fail even more spectacularly than they already have before they actually recognize their real organizational and strategic issues and begin to sort it out.
</End Rant>

(By way of explaining why I feel qualified to comment on this: I'm a thirty-year veteran product manager in the software industry, and I've worked on some of the most visible and successful software projects of all time. I have also seen my share of failures, and the patterns I see at legacy automakers look far more like the failures than the successes).

 

[MissionC]

The Porsche digital group has been posting about their journey from on-prem to cloud infrastructure and it sounds like they still have a ways to go. I try to remember that Porsche lives within the corporate structure of the broader VW group and likely has a bunch bureaucracy to work through. Now, we, the customers, shouldn’t be impacted by that, but it could be a factor. With some of the other articles posted, I get the feeling that the entirety of VW is trying to pivot on software and that it’s going to take quite a while to get there. I agree that throwing bodies at the problem is not the recipe for success. For instance, even though Apple is a huge company, their software teams are relatively small in comparison to other software shops. It seems that with Production 4.0 (new Taycan factory) and the software push, agility is still a struggle for Porsche. Hopefully they’ll overcome it and I hope they make public statements about the commitment to the platforms in our new cars for upgrades and lifecycle managment. My biggest fear in moving to the Taycan from my beloved 997.2, is that I’m giving up a lot of “ownership” of the car to Porsche. Similar to Apple with iPhones, our cars are closed systems and we’re dependent on Porsche for future functionality in a way I haven’t experienced before with any of my previous cars.

 

[porsche_coyote]

The Porsche digital group has been posting about their journey from on-prem to cloud infrastructure and it sounds like they still have a ways to go. I try to remember that Porsche lives within the corporate structure of the broader VW group and likely has a bunch bureaucracy to work through. Now, we, the customers, shouldn’t be impacted by that, but it could be a factor. With some of the other articles posted, I get the feeling that the entirety of VW is trying to pivot on software and that it’s going to take quite a while to get there. I agree that throwing bodies at the problem is not the recipe for success. For instance, even though Apple is a huge company, their software teams are relatively small in comparison to other software shops. It seems that with Production 4.0 (new Taycan factory) and the software push, agility is still a struggle for Porsche. Hopefully they’ll overcome it and I hope they make public statements about the commitment to the platforms in our new cars for upgrades and lifecycle managment. My biggest fear in moving to the Taycan from my beloved 997.2, is that I’m giving up a lot of “ownership” of the car to Porsche. Similar to Apple with iPhones, our cars are closed systems and we’re dependent on Porsche for future functionality in a way I haven’t experienced before with any of my previous cars.

I will say something positive about Porsche on the digital front: like Apple, they are resisting the idea that their customers' data should be mined for profit. Perhaps because they're German, they've really embraced privacy, and I appreciate that as an owner. Some of the US and Japanese automakers are beginning to move in a very different direction which concerns me.

 

[Gogs]

That is an excellent article. Moving from centralised on-prem technology to the cloud is clearly a massive advantage to Porsche. They still have a few teams to move to AWS, once that’s done, then I hope they have the road map to make the improvements and stabilise what they have. The future of new and better application deployment will see that accelerate as the cloud provisioning is much quicker and more cost effective for corporations. Can’t wait to see what that futuse looks like for them. I’m confident that the teething issues will disappear.

 

[Rey1986]

did you fix it?i had the same and seemed to fix it by connecting the phone to the car WiFi hotspot, it could be coincidence but it seemed to configure the connection loop with the car

So tried it. App connects to the car when in the car and connected to the hotspot but that’s it. No connection to a Porsche server, doesn’t sync any info to the app..

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