Taycan to the Alps 18-day road trip 2022

[tigerbalm]

Day 4: Munich (Germany) -> Salzburg (Austria)

Availing of the standard late checkout of our hotel – The Ameron at Motorworld Munnich – we load up our car around midday.

As we are in the area – and continuing with the automotive theme – we decide to drop in on BMW Welt – where the building itself is much of the experience.

Unfortunately the BMW Museum closes Monday's.

We pull into the parking garage where BMW have well over a hundred AC chargers – one at most parking spaces. It's an unusual install with the chargers hanging down from the overhead cable trays – a smart solution and one that would work well at our home underground carpark under our apartment building.



We plug in and use our Porsche Charging Service RFID card to start it. And this is where the installation starts to become less impressive – these chargers are only delivering 3kW!

Fairly useless for the situation where you'll only be staying an hour or so – they really needed to be 22kW to get a meaningful charge.



The BMW Welt experience itself is like a large showroom where none of the car's are for sale!



They had a car that changed its colour – though they all seemed to be shades of grey or black (is this e-ink based or something?)



There was a very interesting cut-away showing an EV battery pack.





And a quirky little BMW Isetta.



And of course a Rolls-Royce or two.





It was interesting to see customers receiving their cars from factory collection – and makes me disappointed that Porsche won't do it for my Turbo S.



Before they drive around the collection centre, into the tunnel and off out into the world in their new BMW.




After a tasty currywurst for lunch we headed back to our car and make our way out of Munich along the A8 towards Salzburg.

Leaving the famous BMW 4-cylinder headquarters building behind us.

The day is warm, sunny and the traffic is moving well.

As we won't get a destination charge tonight, we stop off at IONITY Samerberg Süd for a fast charge.

Crossing the border into Austria shortly afterwards – where we have purchased a digital vignette before we left Ireland.

Before driving into Salzburg city centre – where we park near to our hotel – inside a mountain that used to be a WW2 air-raid shelter.

We then walk the 150 meters through a tunnel to the street where our hotel – Arthotel Blauegans – is located.

Salzburg is a town we know well – and have visited many times – including getting married here back in 2005.

Tonight we'll head to our favourite nearby Rindersaftgulasch (traditional Austrian goulash) place – the Stieg Keller.

The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
BMW Welt	53%	60%	4.46	€5.39	1h 13m	23.0	29	AC 3kW	BMW
Samerberg Süd	43%	81%	36.17	€11.93	0h 17m	26.0	40	DC 350kW	IONITY

Today we did 158 km over 3:05 hours, with an average speed of 52km/h, consuming 19.9 kWh/100km.

 

[ciaranob]

I didn't want auto park function and now, I'm even more glad that I didn't select it.

Wasn't a choice for me - when I configured my car in summer 2021 it was a new item and lumped with the Tech pkg which I needed for other items - def a useless feature and taking up button space!! But we're going off thread - so back to the journey !

 

[ciaranob]

It was interesting to see customers receiving their cars from factory collection – and makes me disappointed that Porsche won't do it for my Turbo S.

You're giving me flashbacks to 2014 - was the first Euro delivery US bound M4 convertible!

BMW Euro delivery for US customers prob hands down one of the best for new car deliveries back then - was really well done - we followed some of your current planned route through Austria, Switzerland and Italy too - absolute blast.

I think this guy was wishing he got an M

Did some of this in Murren too

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 5: Salzburg (Austria) -> Bled (Slovenia)

Our hotel in Salzburg has lots of interesting nooks & crannies that we kept discovering.

After a pleasant breakfast – we check out around 11:00 and walked back into the nearby mountain car park.

And head out of town – by passing in a tunnel under the runway at Salzburg Airport – and heading south along the A1 and A10 motorways.

The road infrastructure is very impressive – with many tunnels.

And viaducts.

Rewarding us with our first alpine scenery.

We stopped into IONITY Eisentratten for today's only planned top-up.

One of the things that we take for granted with IONITY and most EV charging networks – is that they source their electricity from green sources. It's an important background fact to running an EV on a road-trip like this. But where does the renewable energy come from?

Sometimes the infrastructure can be very impressive and as we were at the IONITY station – we thought we'd take a look at one such local source.

So we turned off the A10 motorway and passed through the unusually named town of Malta.

To a set of "warning" signs that every Porsche driver likes to see.

Climbing through a forest of sharp turns.

And tunnels.

Until we reached our goal – the Kölnbreinsperre – Austria's tallest dam and hydro-electric station.



That "bit sticking out" is a see-thru viewing platform that we are heading for.



It's a longer way down than this picture would have you believe.



But we are rewarded with an incredible view – providing Austria with over 1 MW of clean energy.



We walk back to our car and drive back down the same route to re-join the A10 motorway – gaining 5% of battery charge from re-gen.

Soon we split off onto the A11 and head for the Slovenian border.

We actually enter the country half way into a 7.8km long tunnel (toll: €7.80). This is our first time we've been to Slovenia and will be our only "new" country on this road-trip and somewhere we've been thinking about for a while.

We have pre-purchased a digital vignette ahead of leaving Ireland.

Before dropping down into the town of Bled – where we're having the first two night stay on this trip.

Unfortunately it was the most unwelcoming and chaotic experience we've had in some time.

There is a political event on – Bled Strategic Forum – and our hotel – the Grand Hotel Toplice had some political VIP visiting and police wouldn't allow us to stop, park or check-in.

Despite explaining that we were guests here tonight – we were just ordered to move on! We drove around for nearly an hour trying to figure out how to get in.

Eventually we stopped at a sister hotel and asked to park there – thankfully after a few phone calls and messing around – we were allowed to stop at our original hotel and check-in.

None of this was the fault of the staff on-the-ground – who were apologetic and helpful – though with hands tied.

But the hotel could have emailed us to let us know how best to get into their hotel – seeing as they did accept our booking a few months ago – or had staff outside letting guests know what to do.

Ironically the event itself is sponsored by Porsche Slovenia!

Oh – and we can't access the EV charger due to: "security reasons" – of course!

We think one learning from this is to add researching current events in area's we're travelling to in future road-trip planning.

On the positive – our room has a great view of the famous Lake Bled.



If you'd like to drive up to The Kölnbreinsperre yourself – find the route on the "Roads" by Porsche app at https://roads.porsche.com/content/en/routes/the-koelnbreinsperre

The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
IONITY Eisentratten	27%	81%	48.27	€12.93	0h 17m	24	42	DC 350kW	IONITY

Today we did 321 km over 6:04 hours, with an average speed of 54km/h, consuming 19.8 kWh/100km.

 

[tigerbalm]

@tigerbalm Would love it if you would share how you plan your trips - particularly how you identify these esoteric and interesting ev-friendly hotels, attractions and excursions.

Growing up in Ireland, my father spent his entire year planning for our annual road trip to vacation in the South of France - choosing the ferry route, pouring over the atlas picking which autoroutes to take for the scenery, finding restaurants along the way in the Michelin and Relais Routiers guides, plotting interesting waypoints like a detour down the Mulsanne Straight in Le Mans. Is it this sort of ritual for you too?

I described our day-to-day charge planning strategy during our last road-trip here https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/t...arctic-circle-road-trip-2022.9393/post-134494

In terms of the overall idea planning here are a few random thoughts:

• We definitely do active planning ahead of the trip. We see this as part of the enjoyment of road-trips rather than a chore. It helps make the trip last longer – and also keeps this a team sport between my co-driver and I.
• We try to have a high-level theme or purpose to each road-trip. Drive in remote winter wilderness or this trip which is more a celebration of alpine automotive culture.
• Our greatest constraint is getting time off from our day jobs – so we usually have hard start and end dates. We actually plan our road-trips from both ends: start and finish and kinda meet in the middle. That way we know how to get to and back from the region we're targeting and are then free to figure out that as we go.
• In terms of inspiration – the Porsche Travel Experience – is often a good source of both hotels and interesting routes. The team there know what they are doing – and they publish a lot of their info on the open web – so we often "follow along" for some of our trips.
• We use hotels.com for bookings – because it allows us to reserve accommodation ahead of time without paying – and offers free cancellation. So we often will book something "safe" in each area we're staying in without much research – so that at least we know we can stay in the area on the day we plan. Then we'll do more fine grained research – looking for more interesting accommodation and tune the reservations accordingly.
• We're all in on Apple cloud services – so we keep shared "Numbers" sheets, Apple Notes and Calendar's with detailed travel plans as our planning refines and progresses.

Some screenshots of our typical planning resources.

 

[Scandinavian]

Wow! @tigerbalm , thanks for sharing your planning material. That puts my efforts with ABRP to shame! Really impressive the way you work through all that.
Thanks for the tip on Porsche Travel experiences. I used to utilise the BMW equivalent with suggested routes and hotels. But had not researched the Porsche trips.

 

[B61]

What a shame!
Security reasons?!
I'm very sorry that you are having such a bad experience in my country.
I hope next days will be better.
I'd really love to meet with you, but I have some personal troubles and I couldn't go anywhere.

 

[tigerbalm]

What a shame!
Security reasons?!
I'm very sorry that you are having such a bad experience in my country.
I hope next days will be better.
I'd really love to meet with you, but I have some personal troubles and I couldn't go anywhere.

Certainly no reflection on Slovenia - just some European politicians causing chaos - so normal then!

We’re going to enjoy a great drive in the Triglav National Park now! It’s going to be great - hope the rain holds off!

 

[B61]

As I wrote you in private message: in case of bad weather i'd recommend cave "Postojnska jama" & the castle. I see it's very cloudy today, according to weather forecast rain will start in few minutes
Friday will be sunny day... great to visit lake "Bohinj" (i prefer it against Bled).

btw: there are about 100km from Bled to Postojna, so i'm sure you won't regret...

 

[Swissbob]

Day 5: Salzburg (Austria) -> Bled (Slovenia)

Our hotel in Salzburg has lots of interesting nooks & crannies that we kept discovering.

After a pleasant breakfast – we check out around 11:00 and walked back into the nearby mountain car park.

And head out of town – by passing in a tunnel under the runway at Salzburg Airport – and heading south along the A1 and A10 motorways.

The road infrastructure is very impressive – with many tunnels.

And viaducts.

Rewarding us with our first alpine scenery.

We stopped into IONITY Eisentratten for today's only planned top-up.

One of the things that we take for granted with IONITY and most EV charging networks – is that they source their electricity from green sources. It's an important background fact to running an EV on a road-trip like this. But where does the renewable energy come from?

Sometimes the infrastructure can be very impressive and as we were at the IONITY station – we thought we'd take a look at one such local source.

So we turned off the A10 motorway and passed through the unusually named town of Malta.

To a set of "warning" signs that every Porsche driver likes to see.

Climbing through a forest of sharp turns.

And tunnels.

Until we reached our goal – the Kölnbreinsperre – Austria's tallest dam and hydro-electric station.



That "bit sticking out" is a see-thru viewing platform that we are heading for.



It's a longer way down than this picture would have you believe.



But we are rewarded with an incredible view – providing Austria with over 1 MW of clean energy.



We walk back to our car and drive back down the same route to re-join the A10 motorway – gaining 5% of battery charge from re-gen.

Soon we split off onto the A11 and head for the Slovenian border.

We actually enter the country half way into a 7.8km long tunnel (toll: €7.80). This is our first time we've been to Slovenia and will be our only "new" country on this road-trip and somewhere we've been thinking about for a while.

Before dropping down into the town of Bled – where we're having the first two night stay on this trip.

Unfortunately it was the most unwelcoming and chaotic experience we've had in some time.

There is a political event on – Bled Strategic Forum – and our hotel – the Grand Hotel Toplice had some political VIP visiting and police wouldn't allow us to stop, park or check-in.

Despite explaining that we were guests here tonight – we were just ordered to move on! We drove around for nearly an hour trying to figure out how to get in.

Eventually we stopped at a sister hotel and asked to park there – thankfully after a few phone calls and messing around – we were allowed to stop at our original hotel and check-in.

None of this was the fault of the staff on-the-ground – who were apologetic and helpful – though with hands tied.

But the hotel could have emailed us to let us know how best to get into their hotel – seeing as they did accept our booking a few months ago – or had staff outside letting guests know what to do.

Ironically the event itself is sponsored by Porsche Slovenia!

Oh – and we can't access the EV charger due to: "security reasons" – of course!

We think one learning from this is to add researching current events in area's we're travelling to in future road-trip planning.

On the positive – our room has a great view of the famous Lake Bled.




The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
IONITY Eisentratten	27%	81%	48.27	€12.93	0h 17m	24	42	DC 350kW	IONITY

Today we did 321 km over 6:04 hours, with an average speed of 54km/h, consuming 19.8 kWh/100km.

Another cracking TR!

I managed to run out of gas driving my family through that tunnel in an RV a few years back!

Are you going to Ljubljana! It’s one of our favourite European capitals.

Out of interest what colour are you going with fir the new Turbo S?

 

[ciaranob]

I described our day-to-day charge planning strategy during our last road-trip here https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/t...arctic-circle-road-trip-2022.9393/post-134494

In terms of the overall idea planning here are a few random thoughts:

• We definitely do active planning ahead of the trip. We see this as part of the enjoyment of road-trips rather than a chore. It helps make the trip last longer – and also keeps this a team sport between my co-driver and I.
• We try to have a high-level theme or purpose to each road-trip. Drive in remote winter wilderness or this trip which is more a celebration of alpine automotive culture.
• Our greatest constraint is getting time off from our day jobs – so we usually have hard start and end dates. We actually plan our road-trips from both ends: start and finish and kinda meet in the middle. That way we know how to get to and back from the region we're targeting and are then free to figure out that as we go.
• In terms of inspiration – the Porsche Travel Experience – is often a good source of both hotels and interesting routes. The team there know what they are doing – and they publish a lot of their info on the open web – so we often "follow along" for some of our trips.
• We use hotels.com for bookings – because it allows us to reserve accommodation ahead of time without paying – and offers free cancellation. So we often will book something "safe" in each area we're staying in without much research – so that at least we know we can stay in the area on the day we plan. Then we'll do more fine grained research – looking for more interesting accommodation and tune the reservations accordingly.
• We're all in on Apple cloud services – so we keep shared "Numbers" sheets, Apple Notes and Calendar's with detailed travel plans as our planning refines and progresses.

Some screenshots of our typical planning resources.

Almost identical approach - prob only one minor diff in that I tend to use Booking.com more than Hotels.com but for the exact same reasons

Bit different for short vs longer term trip planning of course - we for example have a bit of a bucket list 3 week trip to New Zealand end this year, mostly South but some North Island activity, and in those types of trips we will do all of the above but up to a year or more prior! A bit anal but these days almost a prerequisite (if you want access to certain locations) given the sort of post-pandemic 'panic' travel ongoing around the world

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 6: Triglav National Park [Driving Day]

We woke up to a peaceful Lake Bled – with its remarkable green/blue water.



Despite the wonderful view – we are cutting our stay at this hotel short by a day. Yesterday, when we eventually managed to check-in to our room – we notice a relatively bad smell in the bathroom – a cross between sewer gas and something dying.

We're fairly easy going travellers and put it down to the building being a bit on the old side and need of some refurbishment – so we headed out for some food. When we got back before midnight – the smell was still there and through the night it got worse and worse.

By 04:00 we were both kept awake by it and it had spreed to the living and bedrooms of our suite! We made the decision to book something a little more modern as we really couldn't stay here.

We discussed it with the front desk that morning and to their credit they didn't charge us for the full stay and they also removed parking charge – so we only had to pay for the night we stayed. We were booked into one of their four sister hotels for tonight – The Rikli Balance Hotel – dropping a star to four – but it has been recently refurbished – and was only 150 meters away.

As we didn't get a destination charge last night – we headed off to a nearby IONITY station that is only 5km outside of town.

This is when our planning to never rely on getting a destination charge was helpful – and we knew exactly where to go to top-up.

It was a nice little location with only two charging pedestals with our favourite "fuel station" layout and Plug & Charge started immediately on plugging in – delivering 255 kW despite the car not having that long to prepare for a fast DC session.

Today was a wet day here and despite @B61 giving us lots of wet day suggestions – which we'll take up in the next day or two – we plodded on with our plan to drive around some twisty roads in the Triglav National Park.

We've been looking forward to today for some time since completing planning a few months ago. Rain is a natural part of how forests thrive and while it wasn't ideal – we would still be getting to see this area from a genuine perspective.

Plus we're Irish – if we stopped doing something because of the rain – we'd never do anything!

With the wet day – unfortunately we won't have very many photos to share from today. However, we will be publishing the exact route on Porsche Roads and will share here when they have approved it there.

We love driving through forests and today we had 150km+ of endless foliage – just an amazing experience.

And on a wet day like this – it provides a good degree of protection from the elements.

With clouds rising off the nearby alpine peaks

Resulting in atmospheric misty forested areas – where our infrared camera and Porsche Night Assist activated to warn us of cyclists and animals.

With our passenger display giving us a sense of what this region is like during winter.

We eventually came to another of those lovely warning signs at Soča.

For the next 20 km's until Kranjska Gora we drove the best alpine forest twisty road we have ever experienced! This was just a sublime road to experience in a Porsche.

The rear-wheel steering helping us take the endless sharp switchbacks and PDCC keeping the car completely flat in the corners.

This is Slovenia delivering and doing so in spades!

Find this route on Porsche Roads when if goes live and drive it – no photos can do it justice!

We want to check out a nearby Cold War museum that is just across the border in Austria – so we head over the border.

With the bored looking border guards and army asking us for our passports - unusual when going between EU countries.

We park at the bottom of a forest trail and walk through the mist and fog.

Eventually reaching the museum entrance gate.

The museum shows an Austrian border defence position that was active from the early 1960's up until 1995.

And its associated weapons.

As it was fairly wet at this stage we decided to head back to Bled.

Pulling up to our new hotel – where we had a normal and smooth check-in and were immediately shown to an EV destination charger.

And hey – the views of the lake aren't too bad either! That white building in the middle of the picture near the lake edge being our horror hotel from last night!

We really enjoyed the drive through the beautiful Slovenian national park and forest – and to come back to a decent hotel is the icing on the cake.

Totally worth all the hoop!

If you'd like to drive the same route as us through Triglav National Park – find the route on the "Roads" by Porsche app at https://roads.porsche.com/content/en/routes/triglav-national-park

The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
IONITY Radovljica	23%	95%	60.30	€0	0h 36m	21.5	41	DC 350kW	IONITY
Bled	36%	100%	53.64	€0	8h 0m	19.0	38	AC 7kW	Hotel

Note: at time of writing our charge at IONITY Radovljica has not been charged against our Porsche Charging Service. Marking as free for now.

Today we did 240 km over 6:29 hours, with an average speed of 38 km/h, consuming 24.8 kWh/100km.

 

[B61]

The rear-wheel steering helping us take the endless sharp switchbacks and PDCC keep the car completely flat in the corners.

+1 on that. I’m still impressed how this car goes through the corners.

 

[tigerbalm]

Tasty and refreshing

 

[tigerbalm]

Are you going to Ljubljana! It’s one of our favourite European capitals.

We are – today!

Out of interest what colour are you going with fir the new Turbo S?

My initial spec went with Crayon and Blackberry interior with Crayon deviated stitching – inspired by @pEAkfrEAk's car.

But then after a while – I started to notice more Crayon Taycan's around Dublin – and I really value having a relatively unique or rare car. Now, take into perspective that with around 160 Taycan's in total so far in Ireland – every one is in reality rare!

So then I thought – if I was going with PTS – what would I choose?

And I kept picking blue's like Oslo Blue and Arrow Blue (and also Irish Green!). I also agreed with @f1eng's opinion of being tired of seeing monochrome car's on the road – whites, greys, blacks.

So in conclusion – I switched back to my current Neptune Blue – but with full Blackberry interior (my current car is Blackberry & Slate Grey).

Its not a combination for everyone – but I really like it – and I'm not "bored" of it either. And the yellow callipers from the carbon brakes will go really well with Neptune.

tl;dr: Neptune Blue with fully Blackberry interior.

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