My 2024 Macan EV Never Seems to DC Fast Charge at its Potential

[SteveInKirkland]

How stupid do you think we are?!?

WTH would ANYONE EVER need to charge at 3 am in a “back alley”?!?
They wouldn’t, ever, so quit with the straw men (or women).

It's a statement about risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis.

She assesses risk for every situation and she draws conclusions based on her values. When she was 20 years old, she drew different conclusions than when she was 50 years old.

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[Zcd1]

??????

Enjoy your paperweight.

 

[Petzi]

i prefer to have the best breaks, best handling. my anxieties might be slightly different… but there are people they fear the sky could fall on their head. in this fact averse times nothing astonishes me anymore. may be a tesla is a better fit in more ways you understand..

 

[SteveInKirkland]

i prefer to have the best breaks, best handling. my anxieties might be slightly different…

I tend to lean towards your sensibilities. I have a much higher tolerance for figuring it out.

 

[cottony]

EA and it's sh*tty network has done more lasting harm to EV adoption in North America than any other entity…I'm sure of it.

Wasn’t creating EA a requirement of the Volkswagen emissions scandal settlement? My conspiracy theory has been they sabotaged the project to hamper EV adoption. Or they just half-assed it to close the settlement.

 

[daveo4EV]

Wasn’t creating EA a requirement of the Volkswagen emissions scandal settlement? My conspiracy theory has been they sabotaged the project to hamper EV adoption. Or they just half-assed it to close the settlement.

correct - EA is required by the legal settlement for Diesel gate - VW isn't organized enough to sabotage things - half ass'ing it seems to have done the trick.

 

[Petzi]

absurd conspiracy theory. why would vw want to hinder the transition to ev? firstly, vw is 10 years ahead of the american automobile industry in terms of ev (except tesla and rivian).

secondly, charging works perfectly throughout europe and at the highest possible speed. i fear that the problem is very closely related to the overall poor infrastructure in the usa. i don't know of any other western industrialized country where the power cables are still stretched across the streets on wooden poles.

thirdly it is a peculiarity of the usa that a private company like tesla builds its own infrastructure with massive government subsidies and then does not open it up to the general public. after all, the tax money of all american citizens - including the current porsche owners - was used here.

apart from the fact that tesla makes its charging infrastructure available to all ev owners in europe (at the same price).

 

[MFitz]

yeah? and?

the CCS network in north America current sucks - that’s well understood

what is also well understood is it’s largely outside of the EV drivers control and there is a lack of information to identify problems for any given session

none of this is a surprising outcome to myself or i’d venture most members of most EV forums

Daveo , you could not have made it more clear and I think 98% of owners and forum members understand it exactly as you have made the case. It is simply a roll of the charging dice and until the technology advances (which it will) buyers need to understand this is what to expect. Thanks for your continued effort to educate us all over the years.

 

[SteveInKirkland]

Daveo , you could not have made it more clear and I think 98% of owners and forum members understand it exactly as you have made the case. It is simply a roll of the charging dice and until the technology advances (which it will) buyers need to understand this is what to expect. Thanks for your continued effort to educate us all over the years.

A few days removed from our trip ... As I listen to my wife describe the Macan EV charging experience to her friends after our trip, they are immediately turned off by the thought of road charging an electric Porsche. Note that she always also tells them about how she loves driving it. Just not charging it. Her description also never involves performance issues with any individual charging session. They always involve confusion and vulnerability.

Her stories are always some variant of the feeling of being a distracted woman carrying a big neon sign (the car) that says "I'm rich" and unable to spend time on threat assessment in a Walmart parking lot because the error messages generated by the car are nonsensical to her and the erratic charging experience doesn't give her insight into the health of the vehicle. Her favorite anecdote to tell is the charge port door story that occurred after midnight in a Walmart parking lot off of I95 in VA or NC with some homeless people sort of sleeping about 25 feet from the EA chargers under some trees.

Some of the chargers we've stopped at have less flexible cables and odd positioning.And many of us have experienced difficulty lining up the CCS ports with the inflexible cable. But, with a Macan EV equipped with automatic chargeport doors, the door might start to close while the user is attempting to align the connector. If the CCS connector is not inserted into the charge port before the timeout, the charge port door starts to close. If the charge port door hits the connector, the car can throw a yellow pcm notification, halt the charging process, and force a shutdown and restart of the vehicle (she describes it as rebooting a PC from a blue screen of death). And then a restart of the charging process. During that entire period, she is distracted and vulnerable. Especially the first time it happens and she has to figure out what to do.

And note that I'm with her (intentionally!) for all of these situations so that she doesn't encounter them herself without support of at least a second pair of eyes. It is one of the reasons we did the long road trip together - to get her accustomed to what living with the vehicle is actually like in a compressed time period.

All of her many charging stories are about dealing with (what she views as the erratic) user experience with the car and how it makes her feel and not the throughput of the charging session. The throughput of the charging session is one of the root causes of her view. But it is just the surface level problem.

 

[daveo4EV]

A few days removed from our trip ... As I listen to my wife describe the Macan EV charging experience to her friends after our trip, they are immediately turned off by the thought of road charging an electric Porsche. Note that she always also tells them about how she loves driving it. Just not charging it. Her description also never involves performance issues with any individual charging session. They always involve confusion and vulnerability.

Her stories are always some variant of the feeling of being a distracted woman carrying a big neon sign (the car) that says "I'm rich" and unable to spend time on threat assessment in a Walmart parking lot because the error messages generated by the car are nonsensical to her and the erratic charging experience doesn't give her insight into the health of the vehicle. Her favorite anecdote to tell is the charge port door story that occurred after midnight in a Walmart parking lot off of I95 in VA or NC with some homeless people sort of sleeping about 25 feet from the EA chargers under some trees.

Some of the chargers we've stopped at have less flexible cables and odd positioning.And many of us have experienced difficulty lining up the CCS ports with the inflexible cable. But, with a Macan EV equipped with automatic chargeport doors, the door might start to close while the user is attempting to align the connector. If the CCS connector is not inserted into the charge port before the timeout, the charge port door starts to close. If the charge port door hits the connector, the car can throw a yellow pcm notification, halt the charging process, and force a shutdown and restart of the vehicle (she describes it as rebooting a PC from a blue screen of death). And then a restart of the charging process. During that entire period, she is distracted and vulnerable. Especially the first time it happens and she has to figure out what to do.

And note that I'm with her (intentionally!) for all of these situations so that she doesn't encounter them herself without support of at least a second pair of eyes. It is one of the reasons we did the long road trip together - to get her accustomed to what living with the vehicle is actually like in a compressed time period.

All of her many charging stories are about dealing with (what she views as the erratic) user experience with the car and how it makes her feel and not the throughput of the charging session. The throughput of the charging session is one of the root causes of her view. But it is just the surface level problem.

yeah CCS is fail - both in quality of charging experience, reliability of the charging network, and the ergonomics of the CCS cable/connector design itself - EA's choice of charging locations also does not help and many on the Taycan forums felt "walmart" was typically a bad location to charge $100k-$200k automobiles

the ergonomic superiority of the Tesla NACS cable is well understood and one of the reasons "it won" the battle - but we're in the middle of the transition away from CCS1 to NACS - although the use of an adapter may not enamor your wife anymore than they current CCS1 cable design problems…

Tesla has the superior charging experience - physically, reliability, and in many cases location choice

few if any CCS EV's will satisfy your wife and will all carry similar if not identical issues.

I'd cancel your Rivian order - while it will come with a NACS native port you'll be forced to use CCS1 adapter for a lot of road trip charging - unless you're going not road trip it.

sounds like a Model Y is the best choice for your situation and preferences.

 

[SteveInKirkland]

yeah CCS is fail - both in quality of charging experience, reliability of the charging network, and the ergonomics of the CCS cable/connector design itself - EA's choice of charging locations also does not help and many on the Taycan forums felt "walmart" was typically a bad location to charge $100k-$200k automobiles

the ergonomic superiority of the Tesla NACS cable is well understood and one of the reasons "it won" the battle - but we're in the middle of the transition away from CCS1 to NACS - although the use of an adapter may not enamor your wife anymore than they current CCS1 cable design problems…

Tesla has the superior charging experience - physically, reliability, and in many cases location choice

few if any CCS EV's will satisfy your wife and will all carry similar if not identical issues.

I'd cancel your Rivian order - while it will come with a NACS native port you'll be forced to use CCS1 adapter for a lot of road trip charging - unless you're going not road trip it.

sounds like a Model Y is the best choice for your situation and preferences.

I think there is zero chance (now) that we'll buy a Model Y due to the seat comfort issues. We're trying to understand whether selling the Macan EV is dealing with sunk cost fallacy or keeping it is dealing with sunk cost fallacy. Either way, we're likely just keeping an extra ICE car or SUV (we haven't decided which).

We're not in a rush to do anything and likely won't make a decision until late fall. We've left the car at the house in Florida plugged into a level 2 charger and it will see sporadic use until we need to deal with it after hurricane season.

 

[SteveInKirkland]

yeah CCS is fail - both in quality of charging experience, reliability of the charging network, and the ergonomics of the CCS cable/connector design itself - EA's choice of charging locations also does not help and many on the Taycan forums felt "walmart" was typically a bad location to charge $100k-$200k automobiles

the ergonomic superiority of the Tesla NACS cable is well understood and one of the reasons "it won" the battle - but we're in the middle of the transition away from CCS1 to NACS - although the use of an adapter may not enamor your wife anymore than they current CCS1 cable design problems…

Tesla has the superior charging experience - physically, reliability, and in many cases location choice

few if any CCS EV's will satisfy your wife and will all carry similar if not identical issues.

I'd cancel your Rivian order - while it will come with a NACS native port you'll be forced to use CCS1 adapter for a lot of road trip charging - unless you're going not road trip it.

sounds like a Model Y is the best choice for your situation and preferences.

I talked to my wife about her view of the ergonomics of the CCS cable. Her take is that it can be inflexible but it doesn't matter to her. She feels like she can always get the cable to the right place eventually. When she travels, she would prefer the manual charge port doors to the automatic or the ability to set the timeout on the automatic doors (before they close) from (I think 2 minutes) to 4 minutes or 5 minutes. The charge port doors could also automatically close if the car was switched out of park.

When we bought the car, one of the open questions was "why automatic charge port doors?" A reason given to us by others was that you shouldn't drive with the electric charging port exposed because bad stuff can happen. But ... the charge port doors can break with the automatic version.

We actually didn't want automatic charge port doors but we didn't think they would hurt us. We were always concerned about whether they would break. We're still unclear about whether there are actual benefits to the automatic doors or they are just a gimmick that really only hinders.

The charge port door problem that required her to figure out how to reset the car to get it to either charge or drive was (to her) a huge problem with the car's software and design. It's not the inflexible cables.

 

[xkrblr]

At first, I wanted to contribute with a picture with a charging session that peaked out at 276kW. But this would have missed the point of this thread.

What's possibly next on here? ?

 

[SteveInKirkland]

At first, I wanted to contribute with a picture with a charging session that peaked out at 276kW. But this would have missed the point of this thread.

What's possibly next on here? ?

When I asked my wife about whether she thought the charging cables were the problem at dinner with friends last night, she told another story about charging ...

She reminded me of the D.C. area charging station that we hit during the day and she was approached by a meth addict who decided to literally "spark up" and then initiate a conversation with her to try to pick her up. When I started to move to diffuse it, she told me that she had the situation but, in dealing with the guy, the charge port closed once because it had timed out and she had to reopen it and restart the cabling process.

Her version of the story is more animated about the guy in the parking lot/charging area, labeling it another obstacle to finishing a charging run. She also notes in this story this happens at gas stations but there are more gas stations to choose from. I'm sure many people have picked up that choosing Ionna or other types of stations that might (appear to) be more safe would appeal to some customers. I think you could literally charge a $1 / kW and she would pay it for a burly attendant. It might be $3 / kW if the site includes burly but polite attendants.

 

[tmrqs]

Is really no one going to say the issue isn’t the car, nor the charging stations, but the wi—…?

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