Introduction

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

The Power System Failure

One sunny day on 2024-06-02 in pretty Italy, more specifically in Monza, I wanted to turn on the car. However, powering did not work anymore.There was a red warning message and no way to start the car anymore. Or to open the windows, to lock the door, almost 100% of the electric system of the car shutdown over night.

A bit unfortunate, when you have to get to a business appointment.

After a lengthy discussions and multiple trial and error approaches from the Italian motor support that is provided by Porsche, one assistance was able to get the car working again by jump starting it.

That's somewhat puzzling, as it's an EV and additionally tricky, because the internal 12V battery is an Lithium Ion battery and not a regular lead battery.

That said, with a lot of fear I returned to the The Porsche Center OZS in Switzerland, fully exhausted and sweated through, never knowing whether the car will just break down.

Around the same time the two front windows started to squeak every time you'd use them.

The Porsche Center OZS replaced the main battery of the car, replaced the guides for the windows and after about 4 weeks on 2024-06-27 I was able to pickup the car again. At this stage the amount of hours put into repairing exceeded 50 hours by far.

Review

Again, like in many of the other experiences, there are a variety of different aspects to this problem. Let me start with the most inconvenient one:

Italian motor support & Porsche assistance

With every Porsche, like with most modern cars, you get some kind of "mobility warranty". Which basically means, you have a direct vendor contact and they ensure you can "always" drive. So the coordinate the pickup of your car if it breaks down, provide a replacement car and so forth.

There will be an article about the assistance on its own in the near future.

That said, the cooperation between "Swiss Porsche Assistance" and Italian motor support is a catastrophe. When you call the Porsche Assistance, you will get one information ("they are coming soon"), when you get a call from Italian motor support, they tell you it's a holiday and they come in 1 or 2 days.

So one is not only left in a limbo between not knowing, but also having contradicting information into late of the night.

Contradicting information on handling power failure

While being in this situation, I talked to various parties, including:

  • First Italian motor support guy
  • Second Italian motor support guy
  • Third Italian motor support guy
  • Italian motor support hotline
  • Porsche Assistance
  • Porsche Center OZS

Besides contradicting information about the when, also the how to approach the problem was contradicting:

  • Italian motor support hotline: we will send someone to fix
  • First Italian motor support guy said: cannot fix, it's an EV. It's also too big and too heavy to be loaded on his tow truck. He left within 5 minutes of arrival.
  • Porsche Center OZS: Do not jump start with power booster. If it needs to be jump started, use a regular lead battery.
  • Second Italian motor support guy: tries to jump start it with a power booster - resulting in complete death of the car (no light, no error message anymore) - leaves after killing the last signs of life in the car
  • Third Italian motor support guy: jump starts it with a lead battery, car is back to working. Leaves afterwards, also saying there needs to be a bigger towing car

Leaving on my own - full of uncertainty

After that bad experience and after extending the stay in the hotel for one more night, I decided to try my luck and drive as much back into Switzerland as possible, to at least be back with the Swiss support system. When returning there was a big traffic jam just before crossing from the South to the North of the alps, so I decided to go over the mountain pass instead of the tunnel.

For a few hours I was in the middle of the mountains, not knowing whether the car will arrive or fail any minute.

In the end I was lucky and reached the Porsche Center OZS extremely exhausted in the evening.

The failure itself - sign of poor quality and no reliability

If that was the first failure, I think I'd have been a bit mad. But being one in a long streak of failures, I can only reason that the build quality of the Porsche Taycan is poor. It's repeated failures of all sorts of systems make it the car with the worst reliability that I drove or know of.