TL;DR

The Porsche Taycan has serious quality issues, the official Porsche repair crew cannot fix issues over years and the post sales support overpromises and underdeliveries. Additionally Porsche vendors behave like criminals, not like a proper business.

This report

This report is rather lengthy due to the amount of issues I faced and still am facing as of 2025. It is accurate to my best knowledge and I am publishing it after hesitating for some time, because I think it is important for others to know what they can get into when driving a Porsche, which is in my opinion far from what you'd expect.

Background

Over the last 2 years I had the ability to use a Porsche Taycan Turbo S as a daily driver. I used it to replace my previous ICE car, which always gave me a bad conscious of driving it for more than strictly speaking necessary. At the same time I was looking for something a bit more fun to drive.

That said, let's see how this unfolds...

Part 1: the handover

When receiving the car in December 2022, the dealer took my previous car as a down payment. One day after having taken over my previous car, the Porsche vendor claimed the previous seats were damaged, ripped apart and that they would without any discussion or follow up deduct a few thousand CHF from the down payment.

Now let's take a few steps back in the beginning. Even if it was true that the car was damaged (turned out it was not by me), then finding a solution together is usually the right approach, instead of telling your new customer that you reduce the down payment by a random amount.

This was a first shock, because my old car was in a prestine state when I drove it there. It turned out that one of the winter tyres that were in my old car had a nail in them (not good) and that during taking out of the wheels they ripped apart the seat cover (really bad).

The full down payment was in the end paid, but this was a very strange experience to start with. First they deduct money and only by me proving with pictures I took luckily in the evening before the handover, the money was actually properly released.

Part 2: Failure of the air suspension

On 2023-02-01, after about 6'000 km after I took over the car, the air suspension failed while driving on the highway. This has a nice yellow warning light and instantly changes the suspension from "regular adaptive" to "ultra hard/emergency position".

While the car was still drivable, the warning made it clear to look for the next possible repair as soon as possible.

The repair took about 5 weeks, which as is, I would already find not great, but it was actually was worse than it sounds:

• On 2023-02-03 the Porsche repair center let me know that the car is repaired and I should pick it up
• On 2023-02-03 in the evening at the Porsche repair center I picked up the car and while driving 10 meters, the same message appeared. I walked back into the center to report it and when coming back out the error was gone.
• On 2023-02-04 the suspension failed again on the highway.
• On 2023-02-05 the car went back into repair
• On 2023-02-14 I picked the car up again and the Porsche repair center claimed the problem was fixed by replacing a control unit.
• On 2023-02-15 the suspension failed again on the highway. The smart ones of you are now to suggest that the car is not made for driving on the highway, right?
• On 2023-02-24 I picked the car up again and the Porsche repair center claimed the problem was fixed by replacing a different control unit.
• On 2023-02-25 when I turned the car on in the morning the same error appeared and I drove the car back to the repair center.
• After replacing a third control unit (I don't have an exact log of it) and doing yet another repair round, the car was finally repaired on 2023-03-10. The source of the problem was a partially broken cable harness.

As the Porsche repair center is about 1h away from my home, the effort for going forth and back, picking up replacement cars (read more about Porsche replacement cars was somewhere in the region of 20 hours effort. This is excluding having to cancel 2 trips and dealing with the return of the replacement cars.

While from a technical perspective I can understand that locating the error in a partially broken cable harness is non-trivial, the experience as a customer, the time loss and the non-reliability of the car are all very annoying.

If that was the end of the story, well, it would not have been confidence building, but unfortunately this is just the beginning.

Part 3: doors and head reast start to rattle

Shortly afterwards the two front doors started to rattle during regular driving in the city at about 40-50km/h. The sound would come especially when the road as uneven. After a few days the head rest joined the doors and was making louder-than-the-radio noise as well.

The repair center charged me for adding sound proofing to the doors, the head rest was replaced free of charge.

This brings us to a general interesting point: Porsche generally excludes sounds from their warranty. So if your car sounds like broken, everything thinks it's broken and you are worried it might break down any minute, it's not a problem Porsche fixes on warranty by default, but instead waits until the obvious problem becomes more significant.

Looks a bit short sighted to me, does it not?

Aside from that, the rattling sound of the doors and the head rest is something I have not experienced in any car I have driven before over the last 20 years. The quality of the assembly seems to be particular poor on Porsche cars.

Part 4: The broken wheels or brakes (ongoing)

This is a very particular issue, because the failure started on 2023-08-20 and has not been fixed as of 2025-05-24. Almost two years have passed and the official Porsche center cannot fix it.

But let's first dive into what is broken: when you turn the steering wheel, a ticktack sounds appears. The intensity of it depends somewhat on the temperature and of the angle (strong angle, more sound). The frequency is directly related to the car speed.

The sound first appeared in the mountains of Italy and I assumed it was something as simple as a stick cought up in the wheels. This happens, right? Wrong, not the case here.

In 2023 when the problem first appeared, the car was on summer tyres. After several tests the Porsche center concluded that the problem must be dirt below the cover of the wheels. You might ask yourself "what?" now. Right, so the wheels of the Taycan have covers to make it more aerodynamic. Great stuff in theory.

So the Porsche repair center would dissassemle the front wheels (!!!), clean them, put them back together and send me a bill of about 2000 CHF. Work done? No, the sound just reappeared a few days later.

Unfortunately I had to change to winter tyres soon after, which are are smaller wheels (20" instead of 21"). During the winter the sound was gone, so the Porsche repair center reasoned it must have been the summer wheels. My assumption was that something of the wheels is actually touching other car parts. My assumption has not been rebutted yet, however the one of the Porsche repair center was:

After several repair tries in 2024, a replacement of the front wheels, the winter season of 2024 started. And interestlingly, the sound did reappear with the winter tyres now as well.

After switching to summer tyres in 2025, the sound was gone for a few days, just to reappear. As of writing this article on 2025-05-24, the car is again back in the repair center.

A bit more background to the sound: it sounds like a ticktack with something stopping (like a plastic), being bended and then popping out to make a sound. Almost like an unpleasant instrument. When you drive down the mountains of Switzerland and you drive through 180 degree corners, it as very loud, even louder than regular radio music.

It is also audible at low speed when the steering wheel is fully turned or when one leaves the highway and the highway exit is a corner. So essentially one car hear it at a speed of somewhere around 5 km/h up to somewhere around 100 km/h.

Someone suggested this might be a (known) problem of Porsche ceramic brakes, but this theory was rebutted by the Porsche repair center.

As of today, the Porsche repair center did not find the cause yet.

Part 5: The broken fan

On 2023-09-18 while charging (the car is actually an EV, in case you did not know until reading here) the car started to make a loud noise, a rattling coming from the front right part of the car. Being worried about the car getting damaged, I visited the repair center.

It turned out to be a stone/some itimes inside the fan that is used for cooling the charger/battery. So the more you'd charge, the hotter the car got, the more noisy it would be.

Luckily this item was fixed rather promptly.

However it also makes me wonder, why can stones or other objects enter the fan area and stay there? Looks like a bad design to me.

Part 6: Water in the car and another head rest issue

On 2023-11-29 was shocked when opening the door to the back seats, because in front of both back seats there was water standing. Standing, as in about 5-10 cm high water. In the car. Without rain outside.

So what would be the issue here? Electric cars don't use a lot of water for cooling do they? Turns out that the Taycan has hoses that remove the water from various parts of the car. And these hoses can clog. And when they are clogged, the water has to go somewhere, right?

And that somewhere is in front of the back seats. The car was brought to the Porsche repair center on 2023-11-29 and I could pick it up again on 2023-12-04.

Oh, while we are at it, water in the car alone is not enough. There was another rattling head rest. Actually the one that was already replaced once and it was replaced again this time the car was in repair.

Part 7: Failure of the vehicle power, squeaky windows

One sunny day on 2024-06-02 in pretty Italy, more specifically in Monza, I wanted to turn on the car. After all you have read so far you might guess it, not even powering on worked anymore. There was a red warning message and no way to start the car anymore.

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 Porsche repair center 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. A bit like in a 20 year old car that was poor build quality when it started, but in this case in a 3 year old car, supposedly over average quality.

The Porsche repair center 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 re-re-re-repairing exceeds 50 hours by far.

Part 8: Broken sound system: "eletric sport sound" (ongoing)

The Taycan has a somewhat smart thing, an "Porsche Sport Sound" that enables sound while accelerating. Giving acoustic feedback on the way how you use the car, so to say. Some might call this a toy, but I've to say it's actually helpful to get more feedback from the car.

Practically speaking this system is connected to the inside and outside speakers, so when you enable the "sport sound", you get more sound on the inside and outside.

So how can this break? It is yet another mystery, but here is how it manifests itself:

• When you accelerate, the sounds gets louder, more intense (that is correct)
• However in my case, when you accelerate a bit stronger, there is a strong clangour in the sound. Like a broken speaker...

The broken sports sound has been reported to the Porsche repair center as of 2024-06-03 and has not been solved as of 2025-05-24.

While this is a sound problem and sound problems can be excluded by the warranty, the main function of the feature is to produce sound, so I guess that this has actually to be covered under warranty.

Part 9: Broken onboard charger

Electric vehicles usually have an onboard charger, basically a somewhat smarter inverter used for charging your cars batteries that are DC with AC.

On 2024-12-30 the onboard charger broke resulting into an empty 12V battery (you know the "starter battery"), which results into the whole car being inoperable. After having it towed to the Porsche repair center the car was repaired about a week later on 2025-01-08.

Now there is yet another fun fact. The broken onboard charger is a 22kW charger. It is actually a brand new one, as I had the 11kW onboard charger replaced beginning of 2023, because there are many 22kW chargers in the Canton Glarus in which I live. So the lifetime of the onboar dcharger was less than 2 years.

Part 10: squeaky and rattling windows and a squeaky car

Since 2025-04-09 the front or back windows are squeaky, the back windows are rattling and when driving backwards slightly uphill the front of the car is squeaky as well. It sounds as if plastic is touching when going backwards.

Note: there was no accident or anything like that, however it sounds like parts that are not belonging together are touching.

Other failures

There were a couple of recalls, broken brake hoses, a warning not to charge the car more than 80% and so forth. While these are annoying, Porsche pro actively reached out on those and I consider those issues not to be too big in the context of failures of Porsche Taycan.

Current status

The car is currently (as of 2025-05-24) being repaired, the following items are being repaired:

• Broken wheels / brakes (issue from 2023-08-20)
• Broken sport sound (issue from 2024-06-03)
• Another set of squeaky, rattling windows + squeaky car (issue from 2025-04-09)

The no help service of Porsche

You might have asked yourself, why not return the car, why not get a replacement? Both are things I had a look at with both the Porsche repair center as well as Porsche Switzerland.

The feedback is relatively clear:

• Porsche does not take the car back, it is too late for that, even though I raised that request over a year ago
• Porsche would like to sell me a new car instead and made multiple offers that were exceeding the original price of the car
• Porsche promises to deliver "excellent post sales support" as a compensation for the issues I had - however nothing has resulted from that promise yet.

While yes, trying to upsell is a valid strategy, I think they area completely missing the point here: in my opinion Porsche was supposed to not only deliver a properly functioning car, but also a solid, high quality car.

What was delivered is for any brand sub standard and the services continue to be sub standard. If I was running Porsche, I would be ashamed of the provided service and the lack of quality. However after talking to other Porsche drivers, my impression is that the build quality and the service of Porsche cars as of 2025 are both way below industry standard.