Porsche Connect services and store down?

[Bravo1]

Still down in Texas

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[T-Fury]

The icons are back in my app, but I couldn’t climate control the vehicle this morning before my work commute. Annoying that it has become a bit more hit or miss now that we’ve moved into winter up here. Overall, it still seems to be as variable as it was compared to my first 2020 Taycan. Sad to say but my crappy Ford truck has been bulletproof when it comes to remote start. /sigh

 

[Cwood#44]

Yes, same here and really annoying as just got back home with 10% charge and with the app not working will get charged peak rate to re charge the bloody battery.

Same here in Canada. But was working fine this morning.

 

[whitex]

The icons are back in my app, but I couldn’t climate control the vehicle this morning before my work commute. Annoying that it has become a bit more hit or miss now that we’ve moved into winter up here. Overall, it still seems to be as variable as it was compared to my first 2020 Taycan. Sad to say but my crappy Ford truck has been bulletproof when it comes to remote start. /sigh

Enter conspiracy theory - preventing remote pre-heating saves on heater wear (since during driving there is also heat generated by the battery and motors which is missing while parked), and doing this allows Porsche to slow down the rate of heater failures.

 

[Valerian]

Enter conspiracy theory - preventing remote pre-heating saves on heater wear (since during driving there is also heat generated by the battery and motors which is missing while parked), and doing this allows Porsche to slow down the rate of heater failures.

. Mine was also down in the UK and I was blaming the dealer as had just been in for an MOT which it passed with flying colours. Still has original tyres after 25k miles.
Now dilemma is do I renew Porsche Connect for £269 per year? Thoughts.

 

[whitex]

. Mine was also down in the UK and I was blaming the dealer as had just been in for an MOT which it passed with flying colours. Still has original tyres after 25k miles.
Now dilemma is do I renew Porsche Connect for £269 per year? Thoughts.

I'm still on the free subscription, but the connect service is definitely useful when it works. I use it often to precondition the car, and occasionally to monitor charging or to enable direct charging before a short notice long trip. It's useful enough for me even while the car is just in my garage, that I spent the time and money to install a cellular femto-cell in the garage so that the Taycan can get connectivity in there (that was needed because Porsche is greedy and does not allow for the car to use WiFi for internet access, a feature they have enabled only in Russia).

The deciding factor on whether it's worth some price may be how often it fails. So far I've had my Taycan 10 months and the app had outages or malfunctions (fake privacy mode) has occurred more often than outages of my Tesla app during 10 years of driving them. So the worst part is that I cannot count on it working.

 

[Tooney]

Message on connect-store.porsche.com/us today:

 

[bluedonkey]

It is up right now for me, but I didn't check at the end of last week. I am used to seeing outages on their cloud services, and to getting replies from the support team so late that the services are usually back online before they respond (and they never admit to downtime).

The main issues I have with Porsche's software relate to the connectivity, both the in-car side which seems to have been written with the assumption that it will be connected 100% of the time, with sufficient bandwidth to do anything (pretty much the way the boxes on the developers' desks are) and the server side which seems to suffer from multi-day outages regularly (do they run it on a box under the developer's desk maybe?). At this point, a company like Porsche should be able to run a cloud service that doesn't go offline ever, but it seems they are not there yet.

 

[whitex]

getting replies from the support team so late that the services are usually back online before they respond (and they never admit to downtime).

So what you’re saying is the cloud service comes back online so fast that the support team does not even get a chance to respond before the service is restored?

See what I did there?

The main issues I have with Porsche's software relate to the connectivity, both the in-car side which seems to have been written with the assumption that it will be connected 100% of the time, with sufficient bandwidth to do anything (pretty much the way the boxes on the developers' desks are) and the server side which seems to suffer from multi-day outages regularly (do they run it on a box under the developer's desk maybe?). At this point, a company like Porsche should be able to run a cloud service that doesn't go offline ever, but it seems they are not there yet.

I completely agree with you, their connectivity software is amateurish at best (I've seen better from university projects). In addition to what you said, they seem to lack user experience design across all their user facing software (in the case of the cloud for example, why isn’t there a message indicating cloud is down rather than erratic app operation? Side note, MyAudi app is even worse when the cloud has hickups, which is often). As for cloud expertise, Porsche hasn’t even discovered two factor authentication yet!

I haven’t yet figured out if all this is a result of taking the development in-house where they had zero expertise to start, so are still at early stages of building it, or is this a result of outsourcing the software to the lowest bidder.

 

[bluedonkey]

See what I did there?

I needed a laugh, thanks!

I haven’t yet figured out is all this a result of taking the development in-house where they had zero expertise to start, so are still at early stages of building it, or is this a result of outsourcing the software to the lowest bidder.

I don't know whether Porsche's connectivity is coming from the same team, but I did speak to a team from VW Cloud about a job opening they had, and honestly, there were quite a few red flags there. That team appeared to have started as consultants from an external technology provider and then been hired directly. I had questions about the choice of technology, and concerns that they were offering very low salaries for the experience they were requesting (and lack of other compensation - not even a stock purchase plan).

 

[Cooper81]

I had an email from Porsche telling me about some issues.

 

[whitex]

I needed a laugh, thanks!



I don't know whether Porsche's connectivity is coming from the same team, but I did speak to a team from VW Cloud about a job opening they had, and honestly, there were quite a few red flags there. That team appeared to have started as consultants from an external technology provider and then been hired directly. I had questions about the choice of technology, and concerns that they were offering very low salaries for the experience they were requesting (and lack of other compensation - not even a stock purchase plan).

Ok, so outsourcing to the lowest bidder, then acquiring the lowest bidder to bring the costs further down. I haven't done any reverse engineering on the Porsche cloud software, but if I was to guess, it's probably a patchwork of various open source components glued around MQTT. Did they tell you in your interview?

 

[whitex]

I had an email from Porsche telling me about some issues.

"Unplanned maintenance and server issues"? Is this Porsche lingo similar to "RUD" term SpaceX uses (which stands for Rapid Unplanned Disassembly)"?

 

[bluedonkey]

Ok, so outsourcing to the lowest bidder, then acquiring the lowest bidder to bring the costs further down. I haven't done any reverse engineering on the Porsche cloud software, but if I was to guess, it's probably a patchwork of various open source components glued around MQTT. Did they tell you in your interview?

They did not tell me much about that level, but they are not using open source technology; the platform they were using was from a large commercial software company and the people had worked there, but were hired away (no acquisition) to keep working on the project.

 

[Dabz]

Plugged in my car to charge this afternoon, no connection with the car so yet again I'm paying full rate at home instead of OVO Charge Anytime. The cost of these issues is now getting quite significant in terms of paying 30p/kwh instead of 7p over multiple full charges

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