[North America] - this is getting embarrassing - Porsche nerfing/neutering the PMCC via OTA update?

[daveo4EV]

Thanks for letting us know about this. Mine indeed updated today and I’m not happy. Just ordered the Mustart charger (BTW, it’s sold out on their website, but for now is still available on Amazon). I plan to head to my dealer this week with the Porsche EVSE and demand a refund on it. That thing is insanely expensive and now it’s by far become the worst product on the market for level 2 (barely) charging. Totally unacceptable…

I applaud this approach - corporations only respond to customer feedback when there is data they can use to inform their decision making - customer's returning products due to updates like this is undeniable "data" that is typically used to make better decisions in the future - silently "swallowing" this OTA update will not provide Porsche with the feedback that they need to do better in this space.

I'm not advocating for open rebellion, but polite dissatisfaction along with reasoned requests for accommodation(s) will give everyone the necessary feedback to make Porsche stronger in the future…

we need multiple strong EV vendors in the world to pull of the transition that is being attempted - fumbles like this one are not a strong opening bid - it's important to push for better…the PMCC is a flawed product and needs to be simplified and cost reduced and made more reliable - complexity and feature set is not what is required in this space.

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[Kingske]

I can not replicate this behavior with my PMCC unit - I logged in as the "home" user - set the charge rate to 40 amps - charged at 40 amps - stopped the session - unplugged the vehicle - powered down the PMCC - and then powered it back up - and it was returned to 20 amps.

what software version are you running?

I tried it first by logging in as the home user and could not get it to work either but afterwards logged in as the service rep (if I remember the terminology correctly) user - which has a different password which is also in the little envelope - and then it worked. I will check the software version on Tuesday when I am back in New Jersey as I just returned from dinner in Woodside, CA which is closer to your hunting grounds, I believe.

 

[daveo4EV]

thanks I'll try the other password - even if this works - this is terrible user experience and the vast majority of Taycan owners I would believe lack the knowledge/skill/motivation to deploy this workaround _IF_ it works…

I'll test and report back.

 

[SwissTaycan]

What I get about this post: Totally understandable that US owners are pissed off by this change. Porsche needs to refund them their money or provide an alternative to the PMCC so the charging experience is as initially advertised. In that sense I thought @daveo4EV post was too nice and should have made that claim. This has “class action“ written all over it — and I am not a lawyer.

What I do not get about this post: Why is the solution instead trying to reverse the change and hack the PMCC to get back to what might be a dangerous situation. Porsche must think that the risk of a potential class action lawsuit outweighs someone‘s house/car burning down?

Sorry my two cents and sorry if it comes across a bit callous from someone not affected by it. In Switzerland the PMCC was „free“ (which of course is a misnomer as you paid for it somehow — it simply came with the car).

 

[B61]

I can see potential safety issues, but what is the security impact?

My bad expression.
English is my 3rd language and we don’t have different words for safety/security.

 

[daveo4EV]

What I get about this post: Totally understandable that US owners are pissed off by this change. Porsche needs to refund them their money or provide an alternative to the PMCC so the charging experience is as initially advertised. In that sense I thought @daveo4EV post was too nice and should have made that claim. This has “class action“ written all over it — and I am not a lawyer.

What I do not get about this post: Why is the solution instead trying to reverse the change and hack the PMCC to get back to what might be a dangerous situation. Porsche must think that the risk of a potential class action lawsuit outweighs someone‘s house/car burning down?

Sorry my two cents and sorry if it comes across a bit callous from someone not affected by it. In Switzerland the PMCC was „free“ (which of course is a misnomer as you paid for it somehow — it simply came with the car).

Porsche is nerf'ing all the chargers because a small fraction of the charger can potentially be dangerous - this is the right decision from a corp. point of view.

but a perspective is - that if there are 15,000 Taycan's in North America - and 12,500 of them charge nightly w/PMCC - Porsche just doubled the charging time of all 12,500 Taycan because 120 of them might overheat due to internal/external factors - and Porsche has now made it a daily step by step process for all 12,500 Taycan owners to restore full charging capacity…because of a small risk.

it's also upsetting because it's not like there are examples of 9.6 kW chargers that do not overheat, don't have a safety issue and cost literally 1/10th of the real cost of a PMCC if you buy from porsche as opposed to included with the vehicle.

Porsche documents the North American Taycan as having a 9.6 kW charge rate - but they now have no recommended "safe" EVSE to achieve this charge rate…awkward is an understatement. ARe they goign to recommend Taycan customer get a Tesla/ClipperCreek/ChargePoint/Wallbox EVSE which do not have such safety issues?

it's simply a failure of engineering from a leading engineering design company - and they did this silently, overnight, no choice, no alternative, and no direction for owners to take to restore the specificed functionality impacted by this change.

Since the Porscxhe PMCC is unsafe - Porsche's words/actions not mine - what EVSE DOES Porsche reccommend to achieve the documented 9.6 kW charge rate for the Taycan I paid $180,000 for? Their charger can not do it safely - so who's EVSE am I supposed to use? This is not a safety issue with the vehicle - it's Porsche's EVSE that is the safety issue.

 

[whitex]

My bad expression.
English is my 3rd language and we don’t have different words for safety/security.

No worries, I was just curious. English is my 3rd (or 4th, depending how you count it) language as well, so I get how some things don't translate well. As a matter of fact, now that you brought it up, I just realized that all languages I ever spoke except for English have the same word for safety and security. I work with automotive safety and security however, with English being the primary language at work, and there we draw a clear distinction between safety and security (though there are plenty of issues which straddle both - often a security breach can cause a safety issue for example).

 

[whitex]

but apparently Porsche has no problem doing OTA updates to their entire North American EVSE fleet, but OTA updates to the vehicle fleet is still too iffy to be relied upon - LOL - now there's an insight for you…

No surprise there whatsoever. Updating the car over the air is so much more expensive than just a charger. Car's software has a significantly higher level of complexity, more interactions between ECU's, therefore a significantly higher verification and safety+security certifications. EVSE is already an untrusted party as far as security and safety is concerned, since each Taycan must work with any EVSE out there. This means bugs in the EVSE, no matter how extreme, cannot cause a safety or security issue in a Taycan.

Another way to put it, there is a much, much lower bar to release an EVSE software patch than anything in the car. Within the car itself, different firmware may have their own minimum validation/certification bar, but all of them will be higher than EVSE. Also, I am not sure everything in the Taycan is OTA updatable. I've been doing some reverse engineering on their system, and it doesn't look like everything is connected to the OTA module.

 

[AndiL]

@whitex while that is technically correct, the EVSE is considered to be a part of the vehicle and thus bound to their VR (Verbund-Release) process, especially for testing. So technically releasing an OTA for the EVSE could be done independently, process wise it can‘t. This doesn‘t make a lot of sense from a customer perspective and also from an EVSE perspective on its own, but that‘s how it is.

 

[whitex]

it's simply a failure of engineering from a leading engineering design company - and they did this silently, overnight, no choice, no alternative, and no direction for owners to take to restore the specificed functionality impacted by this change.

Sad day for me. I only recently finally secured an allocation for a Taycan, but one of the big reasons I wanted to leave Tesla for Porsche was the way Tesla used OTA to deliver unfinished products and to mitigate the engineering failures at the cost of a customer. In the old days, the manufacturer had to issue an official recall, usually replace bad hardware with one which functioned as per specifications. Tesla showed everyone you can just nerf the product and get away with it. There are plenty of examples of Tesla nerfing their own fleets to mitigate bad or untested designs (battery SoC limits, charge speed limits, suspension travel limits, etc). They even did it for PR purposes, which was my very first negative experience with Tesla OTA back in 2013. They left their own service completely uninformed about it too (I took my car to service because my air suspension was disabled, even they didn't know that it was Elon pacifying the media about a freak battery puncture accident by a tow hitch - that information only came out a week later, Elon didn't want people not applying the update so he hid it from people).

It seems Porsche is learning from Tesla what you can get away with. Next up, perma-beta features which never get delivered in full, sometimes not even started delivering until years after you pay for it. *sigh*

 

[whitex]

@whitex while that is technically correct, the EVSE is considered to be a part of the vehicle and thus bound to their VR (Verbund-Release) process, especially for testing. So technically releasing an OTA for the EVSE could be done independently, process wise it can‘t. This doesn‘t make a lot of sense from a customer perspective and also from an EVSE perspective on its own, but that‘s how it is.

This doesn't make sense from a technical perspective either. Porsche EVSE may be charging non-Porsche vehicles (it is a standard charger, not a Porsche specific standard, not can the EVSE even reject a non-latest-version-Porsche car), it may be charging Porsche vehicles with any released version of the software. Testing only with latest Porsche firmware doesn't make a lot of sense.

That said, if what you say is true, did the EVSE OTA come with a matching car OTA update? If not, that means they didn't wait to do a combined release process, they did release EVSE only update.

 

[daveo4EV]

Sad day for me. I only recently finally secured an allocation for a Taycan, but one of the big reasons I wanted to leave Tesla for Porsche was the way they used OTA to deliver unfinished products and to mitigate the engineering failures at the cost of a customer. In the old days, the manufacturer had to issue an official recall, usually replace bad hardware with one which functioned as per specifications. Tesla showed everyone you can just nerf the product and get away with it. There are plenty of examples of Tesla nerfing their own fleets to mitigate bad or untested designs (battery SoC limits, charge speed limits, suspension travel limits, etc). They even did it for PR purposes, which was my very first negative experience with Tesla OTA back in 2013. They left their own service completely uninformed about it too (I took my car to service because my air suspension was disabled, even they didn't know that it was Elon pacifying the media about a freak battery puncture accident by a tow hitch - that information only came out a week later, Elon didn't want people not applying the update so he hid it from people).

It seems Porsche is learning from Tesla what you can get away with. Next up, perma-beta features which never get delivered in full, sometimes not even started delivering until years after you pay for it. *sigh*

I also have been doing EV's since 2012 - and 6 Tesla's (never more than 2 at once) since 2013 - I also left to get away from engineering-on-the-fly - I had high hopes for Porsche mastering EV's and giving the world a viable alternative to Tesla for a well done EV and it's infrastructure.

turns out Porsche's mechanical engineering skills remain excellent, but their software and EV skills are sorely lacking

and their EVSE which they include with the vehicle but charge $3200 for separately if you want a 2nd unit for your vacation home is utter crap and way worse than the $200 rock solid EVSE's sold by Tesla and competitors - if porsche was going to fumble something you'd think it would be something a bit more complex than 9.6 kW electrical relay switch - and something that numerous competitors have no problem producing with out overheating or melting.

I too am disappointed but you know that.

 

[daveo4EV]

This doesn't make sense from a technical perspective either. Porsche EVSE may be charging non-Porsche vehicles (it is a standard charger, not a Porsche specific standard, not can the EVSE even reject a non-latest-version-Porsche car), it may be charging Porsche vehicles with any released version of the software. Testing only with latest Porsche firmware doesn't make a lot of sense.

That said, if what you say is true, did the EVSE OTA come with a matching car OTA update? If not, that means they didn't wait to do a combined release process, they did release EVSE only update.

Keep in mind the latest Technical bulletin also advises that Porsche no longer considers the PMC+/PMCC to be generic EVSE's and is punting on their EVSE's supporting non-Porsche EV's

Porsche has 100% fumbled the basics of a North America EVSE…reliable, functional, and compatible.

 

[whitex]

Keep in mind the latest Technical bulletin also advises that Porsche no longer considers the PMC+/PMCC to be generic EVSE's and is punting on their EVSE's supporting non-Porsche EV's

Porsche has 100% fumbled the basics of a North America EVSE…reliable, functional, and compatible.

At least Porsche has the PMCC OTA via its own WiFi which you can block. Tesla can OTA charger via the charging connector, so even without WiFi (Gen1 and Gen2 didn't have WiFi) they can OTA update them any time they want (though I never saw any nerfing on their EVSEs). Tesla car OTA comes via LTE and while you can reject most updates, the major nerfing ones are silent and cannot be rejected.

Does the Taycan let you reject all updates, some update, or none at all?

 

[AndiL]

@whitex you can only by the PMCC when you have or buy a Porsche, as far as I know. So while it technically it supports the same standards as all EVs in the corresponding markets use and thus can charge other EVs as well (as I do here at home), it is not the same as being sold to anyone.

Also regarding OTA for the EV itself. The uPdate added OTA abilities to a lot more ECUs in the car. Porsche is also interested in this as it will reduce their costs for updating existings cars as the updates hopefully won‘t need to be done in the shop or would take considerably less time. So they are getting there.

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