Introduction

This article is part of the series of Nico's Porsche Taycan Experience.

The charger

Also known as the AC charger, the onboard charger is that thing that converts AC to DC and lets you charge your EV using AC.

AC charging on EVs / in Europe

There is actually bit of a funny situation existing with AC chargers in EVs is Europe.

Many EVs nowadays in Europe are however only delivered with an 11kW AC charger. From what I gather, most parts of Europe are offering at maximum 3 phase charging on 220V with 16 amps, resulting in the maximum of 11kW.

So the choice of car vendors to supply many cars only with an 11kW chargers seems to be reasonable at first.

However Here in Switzerland, specfically in the Canton of Glarus, there are many 22kW AC chargers around. And if your car "only" has an onboard charger suitable for 11kW, then you can only charge at half the speed on a 22kW charger of what would be possible.

Porsche Taycan AC charger

Now comes something funny: when I took over the car, I actually went out to a variety of AC chargers in our Canton and was dumbfounded that the car would only charge at 11kW. After clarifying I found out that in the car I have there is only an 11kW charger in place.

Now the great thing about Porsche is, they simply allow you (for a small fee...) to replace it with a 22kW charger.

Porsche Taycan facelift is missing 22kW charger

Now the bad things about the new facelift Taycan is that as of 2025-07-03, it is only offered with an 11kW charger - even the high end Turbo S and Turbo GT variants only come with an 11kW charger.

So if you change from a pre facelift model to a current one, your charging speed on AC can half.

The broken charger

Let's get back to what happened to me.

On 2024-12-30 the onboard charger broke. This resulted into something (technically) funny: into an empty 12V battery.

You may scratch your head right now and need read again: if the AC/DC charger breaks, the car is not able to charge its onboard 12V battery anymore.

This in turn results into almost all functionality of the car vanishing, including changing to a gear, starting the car, moving the car, etc.

After having it towed to the The Porsche Center OZS the car was repaired about a week later on 2025-01-08.

Because I had actually the 11kW charger replaced before, the failing 22kW charger was about 1 year old before it broke.

Review

So like with a lot of failures and defects that I experienced with the Taycan, taken it into a single item, this would not be a big issue.

However the constant and repeated failures of not a single, but so many components show in my opinion very poor build quality and worst of all, very low reliability.

Which in turn means, if I drive anywhere with the car, I need to plan with the car breaking, getting a replacement car and maybe staying somewhere over night.

Dear public transport supporters, if you want to speak up now, you do have a very strong point.