Received an Interesting Call from Electrify America

[SWORDER]

I believe that the affected cars have the 19.2 kw onboard charger, the one that limits the plug and charge features, and that there is some sort of software bug that causes the car not to complete the handshake with the EA charger, and are not caused by user error.

This is interesting. I never considered that the corrupt 19.2 kW charger could kill standard charging mechanics. I figured it was just a Plug and Charge thing.

I have had my car inspected, data shipped to germany, at least that is what the dealership claimed, and there was no flaw found and no fix made. I will continue to repeat having the flaws, documenting them better when they happen and then I will take the necessary measures with porsche.

As an aside, all EA chargers have a verbose "debug mode." When it's on, you can see the exact function the charger is trying to perform during the handshake negotiations when the failure occurs. Unfortunately, every charger I've found in debug mode has been one of my successful charges so can't comment further on where the breakdown is occurring. I'm also not sure how to put the charger into debug mode if I wanted to. It's probably an employees-only kind of deal and sometimes they forget to turn it off.

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[SWORDER]

I am not sure if Dixon has shared if he has the 19.2kw charger on his Taycan, so who knows why he has such a high failure rate at EA locations.

I do indeed. And it was an option I wouldn't have even used if it worked properly. Sales rep talked me into it and I thought, "Yeah, whatever speeds up the charging process." Major mistake on my part.

 

[kort]

This is interesting. I never considered that the corrupt 19.2 kW charger could kill standard charging mechanics. I figured it was just a Plug and Charge thing.



As an aside, all EA chargers have a verbose "debug mode." When it's on, you can see the exact function the charger is trying to perform during the handshake negotiations when the failure occurs. Unfortunately, every charger I've found in debug mode has been one of my successful charges so can't comment further on where the breakdown is occurring. I'm also not sure how to put the charger into debug mode if I wanted to. It's probably an employees-only kind of deal and sometimes they forget to turn it off.

it a problem with the 19.2 unit that causes the plug and charge to not work in our cars. I am just making an assumption that this is the cause of the problems we and others are both seeing.

My only evidence is during one of my complete fail to charge incidents the EA tech commented that despite the car being plugged into their charger he couldn't "see" the car, so that indicated that the car is not communicating. I know that particular EA charger was operational because a Jaguar had charged on it.
As for the bebug mode, how could I activate it?

Lastly the user from NH said that his dealership was able to somehow work around the issue but he has not shared anymore info on what was done to get his car to charge.

 

[atebit]

More importantly, why isn’t EA capable of monitoring their own stations for “suck”, vs having to call a customer to find out about it? If all these failed/aborted sessions aren’t setting off klaxons at their NOC, why not?

Maybe each EA station should feature a ring-down intercom back to EA support, similar to the PTT PA’s that are built into self-service gas pumps for calling the attendant?

 

[jimithing]

I wondered the same thing and almost asked. No I don't provide my phone number to public sites, nor do I post it in the comments. One thing I always do post though is the charger number. I think what's happening is they're matching up the time of my post with their own logs that're generated when I use the Porsche Charging app. And Porsche Charging does have my phone number.

They're saying, "OK, the 'EA Sucks' guy posted again. He's complaining about charger 01 at location X. Let's see who was using it then. Oh, it's SWORDER. Let's give this hoser a call."



She did ask if I were using Plug and Charge. Turns out I'm in the minority of Taycan owners who can't use PnC due to a digital certificate error on the enhanced charger built into the car. So that's a Porsche issue, not an EA one. I didn't bother to explain that to her, mainly because the failures generally occur in the handshake phase before PnC would even be negotiated. Leads to an an "error starting charge" error.

I also have the 19.2kW option and have experienced the "error starting charge" experience, followed by 30 mins on hold with EA before giving up. I've only had one instance where unplugging/re-plugging or switching to another charger didn't resolve it. I'd be pissed if it happened often.

If it makes you feel any better, my nav spontaneously switches language to German on occasion, and sometimes all my assist features simply disable themselves (Innodrive/ACC & ParkAssist). So far the "two finger salute" has never failed to resolve these issues.

 

[kort]

I also have the 19.2kW option and have experienced the "error starting charge" experience, followed by 30 mins on hold with EA before giving up. I've only had one instance where unplugging/re-plugging or switching to another charger didn't resolve it. I'd be pissed if it happened often.

the possibility of having a fail to charge at all is unacceptable. there is a serious problem for a few of us and porsche has not been of any assistance.

If it makes you feel any better, my nav spontaneously switches language to German on occasion, and sometimes all my assist features simply disable themselves (Innodrive/ACC & ParkAssist). So far the "two finger salute" has never failed to resolve these issues.

why would software glitches make anyone feel better?
if the charging issues had an easy fix like rebooting the PCM then it wouldn't be such a concern.
the idea of being stranded in the middle of a trip because of a baked in software issue is not acceptable to me.

 

[TycanNewHampshire]

yes. you were going to share with me how you accomplished getting the car to charge better.

As I stated in my PM to you....I personally don't know what they did, or happy to share. I have called my service dept on your behalf multiple time and they have not come back to me wanting to go out of their way to call another service department and go through what they did. Wish I could solve this for you, but your angst should not be placed with me, personally. I took my personal time to help you out, I am sorry I could not get them to share the information....you are more than welcome to have your dealer call them, as I mentioned. If they ask me to release my info to be shared, I am happy to approve.
It is not I who accomplished this....it is Porsche when I brought it in the first couple of weeks for a charging issue and they did something. See my other post on service times, I can barley get an appointment for myself, yet alone get them to go out of their way and share (what they probably don't even know what they did) what they did with another service department.
I am sorry that I can't do more for you, but honestly your frustration is misdirected toward me.....what can I do but make the calls and request, which I did.

 

[kort]

As I stated in my PM to you....I personally don't know what they did, or happy to share. I have called my service dept on your behalf multiple time and they have not come back to me wanting to go out of their way to call another service department and go through what they did. Wish I could solve this for you, but your angst should not be placed with me, personally. I took my personal time to help you out, I am sorry I could not get them to share the information....you are more than welcome to have your dealer call them, as I mentioned. If they ask me to release my info to be shared, I am happy to approve.
It is not I who accomplished this....it is Porsche when I brought it in the first couple of weeks for a charging issue and they did something. See my other post on service times, I can barley get an appointment for myself, yet alone get them to go out of their way and share (what they probably don't even know what they did) what they did with another service department.
I am sorry that I can't do more for you, but honestly your frustration is misdirected toward me.....what can I do but make the calls and request, which I did.

thank you for your efforts. could you relate which dealership that performed the work and I can try to reach out to them for info.
thanks again.

 

[TycanNewHampshire]

..........
If it makes you feel any better, my nav spontaneously switches language to German on occasion....

this happens to me about 60% of the time! "Ziel Suchen" almost 90% of the time in the search bar

 

[TycanNewHampshire]

thank you for your efforts. could you relate which dealership that performed the work and I can try to reach out to them for info.
thanks again.

I already provided this to you in the PM thread....you have it already.

 

[kort]

I already provided this to you in the PM thread....you have it already.

Yes you did. sorry for wasting your valuable time, thanks again.

 

[TycanNewHampshire]

@kort not a problem, posting on this thread is not an issue as I can multitask, it is just waiting on the phone with the dealer that I need to be off-line working that takes the most amount of my time. My only point was that you have the information. Good luck!

 

[andrewket]

The P&C issue related to the 19.2kW on-board charger option is documented in a March service bulletin. The digital certificate that is used to identify the car to EA is invalid. This is why Porsche suspended the option for 2021.

If you want to learn more about digital certificates, google X.509. Certs use cryptography to prove their authenticity, and have a public and private key associated to them. The private key needs to be protected; if you can steal the private key you can masquerade as the identity represented by the certificate.

Porsche stores this key in the on-board charger. By design, it’s difficult to steal, which unfortunately also makes it difficult to replace. This is where we don’t have enough information: can Porsche replace the bad certificate and key over the air? Can a dealer do it with the right tools? Certainly it can be done via a hardware swap, but that’s expensive. It may come down to that - and we may have get loud to force Porsche’s hand.

I have the 19.2kW charger and disabled the plug and charge option in settings. My EA success rate using the app is approximately 75%, which is confusing. You would expect it to not work at all if in fact this is the cause of the handshake problem, or work 100% if disabling the P&C option was a valid workaround. One hypothesis is that EA is pushing out an update to accept the invalid certificate(s), which more or less makes them valid. It’s possible this update hasn’t been pushed to the entire network just yet, making it a bit of a hit and miss proposition. It’s also possible disabling P&C does work, and my 25% failure rate is being caused by something else. When it fails, I always have to switch pedestals to find one that works.

Note: I’m skipping over a few technical details around how certs chain for the sake of simplicity.

The failure rate is still high enough to make us nervous on road trips. We have no such anxiety with our Teslas and the supercharger network. This causes some marital strife as I prefer to drive the Taycan ??‍

A

 

[kort]

The P&C issue related to the 19.2kW on-board charger option is documented in a March service bulletin. The digital certificate that is used to identify the car to EA is invalid. This is why Porsche suspended the option for 2021.

If you want to learn more about digital certificates, google X.509. Certs use cryptography to prove their authenticity, and have a public and private key associated to them. The private key needs to be protected; if you can steal the private key you can masquerade as the identity represented by the certificate.

Porsche stores this key in the on-board charger. By design, it’s difficult to steal, which unfortunately also makes it difficult to replace. This is where we don’t have enough information: can Porsche replace the bad certificate and key over the air? Can a dealer do it with the right tools? Certainly it can be done via a hardware swap, but that’s expensive. It may come down to that - and we may have get loud to force Porsche’s hand.

I have the 19.2kW charger and disabled the plug and charge option in settings. My EA success rate using the app is approximately 75%, which is confusing. You would expect it to not work at all if in fact this is the cause of the handshake problem, or work 100% if disabling the P&C option was a valid workaround. One hypothesis is that EA is pushing out an update to accept the invalid certificate(s), which more or less makes them valid. It’s possible this update hasn’t been pushed to the entire network just yet, making it a bit of a hit and miss proposition. It’s also possible disabling P&C does work, and my 25% failure rate is being caused by something else. When it fails, I always have to switch pedestals to find one that works.

Note: I’m skipping over a few technical details around how certs chain for the sake of simplicity.

The failure rate is still high enough to make us nervous on road trips. We have no such anxiety with our Teslas and the supercharger network. This causes some marital strife as I prefer to drive the Taycan ??‍

A

you seem be better informed than most of us and most of Porsche. however a 75% success rate is still not going to satisfy me.
I believe that the problem with porsche is that they know that they only fix is that expensive hardware swap. getting loud, moving towards getting the car lemon lawed over this appears to be the only weapon at our disposal to force porsche to address our small subset of cars afflicted with this problem. I am working towards the 3 strikes part of getting the car lemon lawed and I would like to see others apply the same pressure onto porsche in order for them to FIX the cars.

it is interesting to me that EA is implementing a fix. this is good, all I care about is that I can get a charge when I need a charge

 

[SWORDER]

I believe that the problem with porsche is that they know that they only fix is that expensive hardware swap. getting loud, moving towards getting the car lemon lawed over this appears to be the only weapon at our disposal to force porsche to address our small subset of cars afflicted with this problem. I am working towards the 3 strikes part of getting the car lemon lawed and I would like to see others apply the same pressure onto porsche in order for them to FIX the cars.

I'm with you 100%.

The problem is that there are so few of us to which the bug applies. Most people who bought the 19.2kW on-board charger option did so because they primarily charge at home. Not having P&C isn't a big deal to them. They won't complain.

Then there's the people who didn't get the on-board charger who can P&C just fine. They won't complain either.

But people like us find ourselves at the intersection of people who frequently use public chargers, not home chargers, and were incorrectly encouraged to buy this defective on-board charger. That's a really small class of people.

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