Porsche Platz 1 Zuffenhausen Trip Journal

[Raphie]

Last Monday we left at 09:30 for a 635km trip to Zuffenhausen.
The battery was full and the navigation set 2 charging destinations and an arrival time of 16:00 incl. charging times.
However, little did we know reality was different.

Upon till the border we were driving 100-120km/hm leaving the border at Arnhem we did some 220km/h runs and the HP+ battery went down rapidly
But fun comes at a price, so we “just” needed to find an Ionity. (Since they have the preferred rate and not the 30ct/min extortion on top)
satnav > search charging destination > Ionity.…. (Wait…. Wait) and we finally get a list of stations in the right column, but which one to get? It didn’t say distance, it even didn’t say which direction of the highway. So we chose the top one and added it as a charging stop. It added a green square and it said 23km’s but our arrival time was suddenly an hour later, as the charger planned a nice detour, wanting us to crossover the highway in 3k and then drive 17km’s back?!? WTF?

We couldn’t get the charging point removed and now the trip in the nav was screwed. So select Zuffenhausen again, replace the route, have a charging point en route recalculated and we stopped 40kms later charging on EnBW station for double the tariff. Charging itself was painless, however all being 350kw stations the flow rate varied from anything between 40-220kw/h

(Only on the way back we learned the the charging stations search function could be set in an obscure submenu between “route” and “area” and ofcourse, ours was on area. So up untill that point we had to look on googlemaps to find out which station it actually was and if it did fit. We marked 2 more Ionity’s which were in the wrong direction of the high way, so useless. As by then being a loyal EnBW customer, I tried my other charging pass which did not work.

Then there was ”stau” I’ve never seen so much trucks standing still on the highway, lots of roadworks and delays. In the end we arrived in Zuffenhausen at 18:00, which was not to bad. The Rioca Posto 4 hotel was nice and had a roomy garage. Which my 21” RS Spyders loved.
We checked in, went out for a pizza, watched some StarWars on disney+ chromecast and went to bed.

Next morning, driving 900m to Porscheplatz 1, the nav missed the garage entry so we had an illegal tour from Werk 4 to Werk 1, before being stopped by security, who was driving behind us for the last 3mins or so, asking what the plan was. They were nice and explained to me how to get to the garage and there we were, the Porsche Museum.

Plenty of space in the garage and the museum was great. Something I discovered while driving was that my hood wasn’t a 100% even aligned facing the car from the front the left side is like 2mm wider and deepened compared to the right side. After finishing the museum I asked a guy if there was someone to take a look wether this was “in spec” or ”of” and he walked with me in the garage and it was too much. So he put “Werk 4” in my nav and asked me to go there. I did and it is the hospitality centre where factory pickup takes place. A guy helped me there, took pictures and sent them over to my dealer with instructions what to do. That was a GREAT experience. Almost as much fun as the museum itself.

We then went into Stuttgart city centre. Center parking was a different experience: underground, very narrow spirals, going -1, -2, -3 finally a place without any scraping sounds. RS Spyders still pristine. My son wanted to go to the LEGO store, so we went there and after that planned for heading to Cologne. He then decided that he rather had a LEGO set than doing another night in a hotel, so we planned for home (I’ve been in Cologne many times, so this was really for him)
on the A61 we met a GT4 and we had a nice 180km <> 220km/h race for about 15kms overtaking back and forth. That was fun! My son filming.

After that adventure, we had another charging challenge: We planned for the Ionity in Nieuwegein. Which was accepted as reachable charging destination, range limiter was <150km/h 40km’s before it became a limited 100km/h (where we should arrive with 15km left) then 10kms before we moved to limited 90km/s and from low battery to “charge immediately!” And we arrived with 11km / 3% left……. Passed by many trucks on the way.
Then the Ionity did not work, button on the Taycan went RED for the first time and Ionity said “charging error” …
This is not good for your stress levels…..
Luckily the other station worked and we charged to 75% and were home 50mins later.

Overall it was a great trip, but slightly underwhelmed with the Ionity alliance and charging experience:
- seems charging planner discriminates Ionity, NEVER had one selected automatically, nowhere to put charging provider preference somewhere.
- the list of charging stations is a mess, columns are way to small, sometimes it’s commercial station name, other times it’s address, no indication of who is the charging provider. This needs to improve
- area and route, route should be default and it should be forbidden to map charging stations on the highway in opposite direction.

Next trip we will have to go to Ionity website at home first, plan the route, write down the charging stops and put them in manually in the satnav. We should not have to do this. Also range is in reality effectively 200km, as you will drive >100km/h, don’t want to go down to 3% with limited 90km/h speed on the highway and effectively stop charging <80% on DC fast chargers.

I was really happy we did this trip, as it was a quality adventure, but also a steep learning curve of the Taycan charging ecosystem quirks.

 

[cityhpper]

Nice write-up, many thanks!

 

[Torv]

Ausgezeichnet!

 

[Raphie]

Welcome, I guess FEV mindset has a bit of a learning curve. You expect tech to work absolutely fabulous, but in reality it’s only just emerging. Take the Ionity alliance: One would expect Porsche not to only endorse that on a charging card, but also in their charging app. It NEVER suggested an Ionity by itself. Even if there was one on the same premise where the EnBW chargers were.

There is no option to set a preferred charging supplier, with the thousands of chargers in there, in a 12 character wide colunm, having nothing usable in the first 12 characters of an on avg 50 char description, even making an educated guess is impossible. The “route” or “nearby” options don’t count if you look for a charger yourself. It only counts for when the system is planning the trip. So even when having “route” selected, when adding a manual charge stop, you could still select a charger on the opposite side of the highway, which, EVEN if the 2 stations are next to each other on each side, the system will tell you that “yours” is 15miles down the road (being driving 7.5miles to the next exit and then drive 7.5 miles back)

So the system doesn‘t do what rational thinking people would expect it to do.

the other thing I really don’t like is that the default “zoom“ position of the satnav is useless, it’s like 20km of road, in a 2D view, the +/- for zoom are not tactile / ergonomic AT ALL and way to slow. Also. After idling for 20 secs or so it does not default back to whatever the default zoom position is supposed to be. Coming from Mercedes Command this is really underwhelming.
Before People suggest, I know I can use the trackpad as well, for 2 finger zooming and other gestures, but again tactile response is lightyears away from your iPad or iPhone screen.

Ofcourse, after learning (read severely underwhelmed acceptance, as there is nothing you can do about it) things will get “easier” (read you’ll find a way around the quirks) But it’s not what I expected. Don’t get me started on continuous “map updates” freezing the sytem, route recalcs, which might take like 10mins before the recommends new charging stops.
This is all good when you’re doing your daily commute on the roads you know inside out.
But when in a foreign country, having no hinsight , or reference, it’s infuriating.

The driving experience and design are top notch. That makes up for a lot of frustrations. Would this have been your avg A5, BMW4, or Merc E, the car would had been long gone.

 

[Scandinavian]

Upon till the border we were driving 100-120km/hm leaving the border at Arnhem we did some 220km/h runs and the HP+ battery went down rapidly
But fun comes at a price, so we “just” needed to find an Ionity. (Since they have the preferred rate and not the 30ct/min extortion on top)
satnav > search charging destination > Ionity.…. (Wait…. Wait) and we finally get a list of stations in the right column, but which one to get? It didn’t say distance, it even didn’t say which direction of the highway. So we chose the top one and added it as a charging stop. It added a green square and it said 23km’s but our arrival time was suddenly an hour later, as the charger planned a nice detour, wanting us to crossover the highway in 3k and then drive 17km’s back?!? WTF?

I can understand your frustration about the PCM not being able to filter out just Ionity stations. Unfortunately driving a Taycan on long trips requires a fair bit additional planning as compared to an ICE car. If you are not familiar with the stretch of road and the locations of good Ionity stations, you just need to sit down and plan beforehand. Takes a few extra minutes but saves a lot of frustration later.

One good way of doing this is to plan the route with ABRP (A Better Route Planner). You just set it to only use Ionity stations. Once you find these stations on the route, print out the route and use the locations and names to input into your Porsche app. Check the station so it is on the correct side of the road and mark it with the little star symbol and send it to the vehicle. Once you have done that these stations will be marked with a star in the cars navigator. From there it is easy to plan the charging stops. Below are the ones I have frequently made use of.

Also make sure you set your filter to only indicate the stations that provide more than 270 kW in the app. It takes away a lot of clutter.

 

[Scandinavian]

After that adventure, we had another charging challenge: We planned for the Ionity in Nieuwegein. Which was accepted as reachable charging destination, range limiter was <150km/h 40km’s before it became a limited 100km/h (where we should arrive with 15km left) then 10kms before we moved to limited 90km/s and from low battery to “charge immediately!” And we arrived with 11km / 3% left……. Passed by many trucks on the way.

Sounds like you have the great Porsche SW called Intelligent Range Manager. That assumes Porsche is good at SW???

I was strongly recommended NOT to bother with this option by mySales Guy. And luckily the showroom car I bought did not have it specified. Semester it still after 3 years is not really improved and useful.

In all my long trips I have never had any such experience as the car throttling speed. And in my experience the predicted SoC at destinations have been absolutely spot on. Yes it might be off when hammering at over 200 km/h on the German motorways some times. But these occasions are very rare since there normally are a hell of a lot of roadworks with 60 or 80 km/h.

Try next time to switch off that (UN) Intelligent Range Manager if that is possible.

 

[Raphie]

Excellent input, highly appreciated.

 

[Scandinavian]

Excellent input, highly appreciated.

I actually saw today that you can filter the MyPorsche app to only show the Ionity stations. That could help out as well. It seems to work for me when looking for chargers, but when trying to plan a route in the app, it does not adhere to that filter?/ Why oh why?

Use the app and browse along and check the different stations and send them as favourites to your vehicle.

 

[Raphie]

Yes, I did saw the same today seems to be the latest update.

 

[dutchcourage]

Last Monday we left at 09:30 for a 635km trip to Zuffenhausen.
The battery was full and the navigation set 2 charging destinations and an arrival time of 16:00 incl. charging times.
However, little did we know reality was different.

Upon till the border we were driving 100-120km/hm leaving the border at Arnhem we did some 220km/h runs and the HP+ battery went down rapidly
But fun comes at a price, so we “just” needed to find an Ionity. (Since they have the preferred rate and not the 30ct/min extortion on top)
satnav > search charging destination > Ionity.…. (Wait…. Wait) and we finally get a list of stations in the right column, but which one to get? It didn’t say distance, it even didn’t say which direction of the highway. So we chose the top one and added it as a charging stop. It added a green square and it said 23km’s but our arrival time was suddenly an hour later, as the charger planned a nice detour, wanting us to crossover the highway in 3k and then drive 17km’s back?!? WTF?

We couldn’t get the charging point removed and now the trip in the nav was screwed. So select Zuffenhausen again, replace the route, have a charging point en route recalculated and we stopped 40kms later charging on EnBW station for double the tariff. Charging itself was painless, however all being 350kw stations the flow rate varied from anything between 40-220kw/h

(Only on the way back we learned the the charging stations search function could be set in an obscure submenu between “route” and “area” and ofcourse, ours was on area. So up untill that point we had to look on googlemaps to find out which station it actually was and if it did fit. We marked 2 more Ionity’s which were in the wrong direction of the high way, so useless. As by then being a loyal EnBW customer, I tried my other charging pass which did not work.

Then there was ”stau” I’ve never seen so much trucks standing still on the highway, lots of roadworks and delays. In the end we arrived in Zuffenhausen at 18:00, which was not to bad. The Rioca Posto 4 hotel was nice and had a roomy garage. Which my 21” RS Spyders loved.
We checked in, went out for a pizza, watched some StarWars on disney+ chromecast and went to bed.

Next morning, driving 900m to Porscheplatz 1, the nav missed the garage entry so we had an illegal tour from Werk 4 to Werk 1, before being stopped by security, who was driving behind us for the last 3mins or so, asking what the plan was. They were nice and explained to me how to get to the garage and there we were, the Porsche Museum.

Plenty of space in the garage and the museum was great. Something I discovered while driving was that my hood wasn’t a 100% even aligned facing the car from the front the left side is like 2mm wider and deepened compared to the right side. After finishing the museum I asked a guy if there was someone to take a look wether this was “in spec” or ”of” and he walked with me in the garage and it was too much. So he put “Werk 4” in my nav and asked me to go there. I did and it is the hospitality centre where factory pickup takes place. A guy helped me there, took pictures and sent them over to my dealer with instructions what to do. That was a GREAT experience. Almost as much fun as the museum itself.

We then went into Stuttgart city centre. Center parking was a different experience: underground, very narrow spirals, going -1, -2, -3 finally a place without any scraping sounds. RS Spyders still pristine. My son wanted to go to the LEGO store, so we went there and after that planned for heading to Cologne. He then decided that he rather had a LEGO set than doing another night in a hotel, so we planned for home (I’ve been in Cologne many times, so this was really for him)
on the A61 we met a GT4 and we had a nice 180km <> 220km/h race for about 15kms overtaking back and forth. That was fun! My son filming.

After that adventure, we had another charging challenge: We planned for the Ionity in Nieuwegein. Which was accepted as reachable charging destination, range limiter was <150km/h 40km’s before it became a limited 100km/h (where we should arrive with 15km left) then 10kms before we moved to limited 90km/s and from low battery to “charge immediately!” And we arrived with 11km / 3% left……. Passed by many trucks on the way.
Then the Ionity did not work, button on the Taycan went RED for the first time and Ionity said “charging error” …
This is not good for your stress levels…..
Luckily the other station worked and we charged to 75% and were home 50mins later.

Overall it was a great trip, but slightly underwhelmed with the Ionity alliance and charging experience:
- seems charging planner discriminates Ionity, NEVER had one selected automatically, nowhere to put charging provider preference somewhere.
- the list of charging stations is a mess, columns are way to small, sometimes it’s commercial station name, other times it’s address, no indication of who is the charging provider. This needs to improve
- area and route, route should be default and it should be forbidden to map charging stations on the highway in opposite direction.

Next trip we will have to go to Ionity website at home first, plan the route, write down the charging stops and put them in manually in the satnav. We should not have to do this. Also range is in reality effectively 200km, as you will drive >100km/h, don’t want to go down to 3% with limited 90km/h speed on the highway and effectively stop charging <80% on DC fast chargers.

I was really happy we did this trip, as it was a quality adventure, but also a steep learning curve of the Taycan charging ecosystem quirks.

Finding the right ionity through the Porsch nav sucks, I’m also struggling with it in germany. I use the nav app ABRP. This saves a lot of time.

 

[bob66hall]

As I've told my many Germanic and North American friends (with a smile), "The Taycan is a German car (it's great!). The software is also German." :-( Fortunately, I've noticed software improvements of late, and will hope for more.......

 

[Scandinavian]

Finding the right ionity through the Porsch nav sucks, I’m also struggling with it in germany. I use the nav app ABRP. This saves a lot of time.

Even easier now that you can set the Ionity filter in MyPorsche app. It only shows Ionity stations and when you zoom in you can see if it is in the direction you are travelling. Then simply send that destination to the car and also mark it as a favourite for future use.

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