I hope so for him..
That is bad news. When did ter heater fail? When it was freezing last week or just now ? I just hope mine doesn’t fail while on winter sports. Last year it was just before and fixed in time.
Last week, after few days freezing.
The failure mode has not been made public, so nobody outside of Porsche or the heater manufacturer knows what breaks it and how it breaks. If you could as you suggest, using it a lot makes it wear out faster, or it could be the opposite, using it less (setting to low heat) could cause higher to turn on less often causing it to have wider temperature swings (it has a chance to fully cool off before turning on again, which means higher swings). Even pre-heating might be bad for it (again, longer time on) or it might be good for it (the heater can preheat working less hard, vs. if you get into a cold car it has to go on full throttle).
I agree with you about the fault rate of the car. Communications from Porsche is totally lacking. They never ever acknowledge any of the problems we encounter. And even if there was a lot of activities some time ago to update the PCM and prepare for OTA updates, I have not once seen any such OTA update in 3.5 years. Map updates yes, which I wish did not occur, but not PCM or others. There is so much time wasted at going to the Porsche Centers.
IMO tire rotation and new wipers are Tesla profit upsell. They actually started adding those 2 to almost every service quote, even when I didn't ask for them (had to always message back for them to remove the two items, as I didn't ask for them). In the US you can swap your own wipers for much better quality silicone ones for 40% of what Tesla charges, they work better and they last longer. As for tire rotation, we had 4 Model S'es in 10 years, the tires always wore evenly (I check every 6 months all family cars, takes less than 5 minutes per car). I also question the "rotate tires ever X miles" recommendation as it makes no logical sense:
Do you really think they've been paying for months of loaners while people wait for new heaters, and in the 4 years this has been happening they haven't redesigned the heater to be more reliable? I suspect they foot the bill for new heaters (at cost, since they make them), but not for replacing them or loaner cars, so at Taycan volumes it's just cheaper to provide free replacements than to redesign.
IMO they did some very minor updates to attempt to mitigate the issue, but likely small changes to the hardware (if any) and a firmware upgrade (such as derating it, whether the max heat or heat gradient, who knows). A complete redesign and certification in all different countries is probably way more expensive than just giving away new heaters - remember that the Taycan does not have huge volumes, and they Webasto gets them at cost. So if an incremental volume heater landed cost is $100 (remember, the cost to Porsche is much higher as it includes amortization of engineering and certification costs), it's hard for them to justify spending millions to redesign, recertify. If they have to replace one heater for every single Taycan ever produced (after warranty they get paid for it), that's a $10M dollar budget, which may be nothing compared to the cost to redesign/recertify in all different countries.
Same situation. I am pre conditioning to 25 degr Celsius for an hour before driving home in the evening. I hope it fails now if it has to fail and not during holidays. Temperatures are not very low now.
There was a recall of Taycans in Canada for heaters in May, 2023. This was after the Feb. 2023 date for the supposedly improved heaters.
