Introduction

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

The Suspension Failure

After the very rocky start, it was not long until there was another surprise: about 6'000 km after taking over the car and 2 months in, the suspension started to fail.

What does it mean the suspension starts to fail anyway? To answer that, let's have a short look at what we are dealing with.

The Porsche Taycan Air Suspension

The Porsche Taycan comes with a variable ride height air suspension. It allows you to lift the car (which is often necessary for road bumps) or lower the car (which is nifty for corners).

And when you don't manually up or down it, the idea is that you get a comfortable drive with it. So much for the regular cases...

Suspension failure = stuck

If the car detects an error with the air suspension, it switches into an "emergency mode" (I'm calling it like that, maybe there is a more appropriate term for it).

And that mode is very different from any of the normal modes. It is unpleasantly hard and makes the car feel uncontrollable. It does not react to the road anymore, but becomes totally stiff. Not in the pleasant, hard sporty way, but in a bumpy hard way.

So whenever this mode kicks in, you want to drive as little as possible with it, because the car does not feel trustworthy anymore.

Failure 1: 2023-01-01

While being on the Swiss highway, this suspension failed and I brought the car to the nearest Porsche Center, Porsche Center OZS. After checking the error the Porsche Center claimed on 2023-02-03 that the problem has been solved. So far, so good, 2 days for fixing the air suspension is quite OK. The Porsche Center told me that a control unit has failed and was replaced.

However, after driving less than 10 meters on the property of Porsche OZS, the same error happened again. The technician onsite told me that is probably just a leftover, as it is when you replace the key battery.

It turned out it wasn't and it came back the day after.

Failure 2: 2023-02-04

So three days after the first fault, one day after the first repair the car was back in repair. This time the Porsche Center was saying it would do a more thorough analysis. So 10 days later, on 2023-02-14 I picked up the repaired car again. Again a control unit, albeit a different one was replaced. 10 days or 13 days since the first failure? Well, might still be acceptable for something as sophisticated as a suspension.

Only if this was already the ending, unfortunately it was not.

Failure 3: 2023-02-15

One day after picking up the car, the same error happened again on the highway. Maybe I am doing it wrong and Porsches are not made for driving highway?

So the car went back to the same Porsche Center, one day after being repaired the 2nd time.

At this point, one starts to question, what is going wrong here? Why does it need more than 1, more than 2 repairs and how long is this whole thing going to take? And how many hours does one have to spend on bringing the car in and picking it up?

Another 9 days in, on the 2023-02-24, the Porsche Center claimed again that the suspension has been repaired. My thoughts were "really ...?"

So what did they do this time? Can you guess it? YES, another control unit was replaced. I had to ask: "how many of them does the car have???" and the answer was "many" - uh-oh.

But this time, this time, this time it is fixed, isn't it?

Failure 4: 2023-02-25

One day in, the suspension failed again. I'm not making this up, again one day after I received the car back, the same issue happened again. UN-BE-LIEV-ABLE - was what I was thinking, in CAPS.

The good news is, this was the last needed repair. On 2023-03-08, about 5 weeks after the initial failure, Porsche Center OZS found the real issue: a partially broken cable harness. After fixing that, the failure has not reappeared anymore.

Review

Ok, so this is a tricky one. I'm in tech, I'm in IT and a partially broken something is really tricky to debug. So wearing my IT head, I can somewhat sympathise with them

However as a customer, phew, I am so disappointed. 4 times coming in and out for the same issue? Five really long demanding weeks? That is really not acceptable, not for any car brand and especially not one that wants to claim building quality cars and providing quality service.

So after the handover screwup, this was the second very disappointing experience.