2025 Taycan released but what about existing Taycan owners?

[whitex]

Completely agree. But what I fear with a German manufacturer is that all new software adjustments and/or gadgets will no longer be available for the older models. Yes, or at a ridiculous price.

But are we really entitled to those improvements for free? If a customer buys a product, should the product price include not just the engineering amortization that went into the product, but also 20 years of engineering effort to continue improving the product? Supporting even software on older platforms costs a lot of money, even if you have full OTA deployment which Porsche definitely does not.

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[Fish Fingers]

Completely agree. But what I fear with a German manufacturer is that all new software adjustments and/or gadgets will no longer be available for the older models. Yes, or at a ridiculous price.

I think that's where we are with all the manufacturers at the moment.
But this is where it's good news that we have a tidal wave of Chinese car manufacturers (disrupter) moving in.

If the old brigade treat their customers badly and the new ones don't (and it's a lot easier business model for the disrupters) then everyone will just jump ship.

It happened before with Japanese cars v UK/US cars in the 70s.
The traditional manufacturers thought they had the monopoly and Japanese cars were a joke.
US manufacturers carried on with gas guzzlers / UK with just utter 5hite (eg British Leyland).

Then the oil crisis hit and the rest is history.

There should be no loyalty to brands who treat customers like mugs.

 

[jvdsanden]

But are we really entitled to those improvements for free? If a customer buys a product, should the product price include not just the engineering amortization that went into the product, but also 20 years of engineering effort to continue improving the product? Supporting even software on older platforms costs a lot of money, even if you have full OTA deployment which Porsche definitely does not.

Premium brands like Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, etc. do that for free. And if you have delivered a product that does a perfect job then you don't need any updates, but unfortunately that is not the case with this car. I don't know if you have already experienced it, there are a lot functions for which you paid extra when purchasing. After three years you have to take out an extra subscription to be able to use them (this includes charging planner, radio plus, navigation plus, finder, voice pilot, risk radar, news, instruction booklet, weather, agenda, Spotify, Apple podcast, remote control to open and close, etc.). This is all covered by Porsche connect. I'm trying to figure out what still works after three years, given the list not very much anymore. I hope I can still drive.

 

[Jonathan S.]

But are we really entitled […]

When the question is truncated to be stated more broadly about this forum, then the answer is most definitely a Yes!
(Now back to pondering why Taycan used wholesale prices do not appreciate relative to the original resale price at the same rate as the S&P500…)

 

[f1eng]

But are we really entitled to those improvements for free? If a customer buys a product, should the product price include not just the engineering amortization that went into the product, but also 20 years of engineering effort to continue improving the product? Supporting even software on older platforms costs a lot of money, even if you have full OTA deployment which Porsche definitely does not.

Exactly this.
When Huntingdon Racing car constructor Lola went bust and was bought by an enthusiast he hired me as a consultant to help his young engineers sort out what was wrong with their car (all their customers dumped them in CART and bought Reynards or Swifts)
Lola made customer single seaters and sports racing cars.
The single seater buyers were always keen to keep us working on improvements which they hassled us to get first of the customers and expected to pay for.
The Sportscar buyers had the attitude of “it should have been perfect from day 1 and expected any performance updates free!

Making the improvements with continuous work was very expensive.

We did have the fastest car and teams dropped Reynards and bought Lolas.

The new owner was an older guy with a lot of friends in the Sportscar racing (Le Mans) world and so he was much keener to supply them than the single seaters.

CART died sadly, it was the only good single seater formula other than F1 back then.
With just sports cars Lola went bust again.

 

[irrelevant]

Actually I did a quick test on the configurator. When you change the spec in the configurator the WLTP is adjusted automatically
- When I chose my wheels (21" RS Spyder) and only switched from the Standard new tyres (supposed to be efficient, probably Hankook as well?) to Standard Summer Tyres, the WLTP range dropped by 28 km. So one thing we can do is just buy the new efficient tyres when our tyres get worn...
The rims is another budget and from what I see the difference of efficiency between RS Spyder with new tyres vs switching completely to the new 21" Aero only brings 13 km of WLTP efficiency

But all of this is WLTP so I am not sure how much I can trust it.



Agree 100%. But if they bring all the tech to the current Taycan (which is a big IF), it will only be the range who differs. And for that I say let's see what real life range will look like. The example trip Stuttgart -> Barcelona is done in 13 hours instead of 13h40 min. So for shorter trips (6 or 7 hours) probably the difference is around 20 min per trip. If that's true, it is not worth it IMHO, it is better to have a better looking car and a cheaper one

I don't understand this at all. Who chooses to drive 13 hours anywhere? I can be on the other side of the planet in that time, in a more appropriate transportation tool.

It's not as if Porsche owners can't afford to buy airplane tickets.

 

[007]

I don't understand this at all. Who chooses to drive 13 hours anywhere? I can be on the other side of the planet in that time, in a more appropriate transportation tool.

It's not as if Porsche owners can't afford to buy airplane tickets.

All my spare cash went towards the Taycan. We just flew out to Santa Barbara last night, this pretty much sums it up my airfare budget now…

 

[RGBArgee]

I hear they make pretty decent paperweights.

Seriously though, don't sweat it and part and parcel of EV ownerships...there's always a better one.

any one else heard the Porsche totem paperweight is no more. Bought 992 TS in September and still waiting- Porsche again putting profits before customer satisfaction???

 

[W1NGE]

any one else heard the Porsche totem paperweight is no more. Bought 992 TS in September and still waiting- Porsche again putting profits before customer satisfaction???

Not sure but my wife got one with her Macan T last May and I got another one with my GTS ST last March.

 

[RGBArgee]

Not sure but my wife got one with her Macan T last May and I got another one with my GTS ST last March.

I got one with my Taycan in March 23.

 

[DerekS]

since the miles per charge gets so improved for 2025 Taycan models, what we do with our existing Taycan model? I am very frustrated. My car isn’t even 1 year old.

Throw it in the gutter, and go buy another.

 

[whitex]

Premium brands like Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, etc. do that for free. And if you have delivered a product that does a perfect job then you don't need any updates, but unfortunately that is not the case with this car.

I think you have come misconceptions. I have been using products from the premium brands you mention and the story is not that straightforward. Let's break it down by company.
Microsoft - they support software on their hardware products about 2 years. Sure, you can get Windows or Office updates (within the same version) for a an older Surface, but not all drivers are supported then for example. Most importantly, if the new feature requires newer hardware, or is just incompatible with your PC, it's your problem. Essentially Microsoft will support their software for longer, as they are a software company, but their hardware not so much (2 years). So when you install an update from Microsoft on unsupported hardware, some computers will not work as fast, or freeze periodically, or crash. Automotive companies don't have this luxury - "sorry Mr. Taycan Driver's family, the driver installed this update at their own risk, the fact that it sent the car over a cliff at full throttle was an incompatibility between the old hardware and new software, sorry about your loss". Another way to put it, Microsoft only support their software products for a long time, which are never guaranteed for safety critical applications, i.e. to not crash or do something unexpected. As a matter of fact there are guided missiles in the US arsenal which run Windows which is certified to be safety critical. It's Windows NT, last updated in the 90's. Oh, Microsoft Sync (their car software) was never supported like your desktop/tablet/phone software either.

Apple - they offer the longest software support of any phone or tablet out there. Still, older devices don't get latest iOS (e.g. I still have an iPhone 6 and 7, neither get latest OS, and 6 doesn't get almost any updates anymore). They are also slow to use, with a bunch of new features not available. Again, great for a phone, but not so great if an internet connected car was no longer getting most security updates after 6 years.

Tesla. I've driven them for over a decade. Owned 4 Model S in that time. Yes they get continued updates, but similarly to Apple, driving a 6 year old Tesla is like using a 6 year old iPhone - it looks similar to recent ones, but some features don't work, others don't exist, and it's slow. For example, 3 of the 4 Model S'es, the browser, which is used to display user manual, update release notes, or I used to use it for Waze, stopped working almost completely after Tesla switched to using newer hardware but kept updating the older hardware with new software. It was annoying to lose functionality (the browser was still there, but only worked for a few minutes if you did a deep reset of the car). Others have lost functionality like heated seats - if you had executive seat option, you could control back and bottom heating separately. After one of the updates only the bottom worked, then a fix made them both worked but not controlled separately ever again. New features like dashcam for example only worked on newer cars of course, i.e. they were not enabled at all on cars missing the hardware, and brought the infotainment to a grinding halt on cars which had early versions of the hardware. So Tesla updates fix bugs, bring new features, but also add bugs and disable features. Once Tesla switched to landscape screen orientation, their UI was also redesigned for those screens, so it lost ease of use on the original portrait screen.

All of the above examples are products with full over-the-air update, which Taycan does not have. Only one of them is automotive. Tesla is updating the older cars because they do continuous integration (many, many updates per year) on a very complex software (e.g. Linux) and it's cheaper for them to update older cars to new software, even if it loses functionality, than to keep providing just security patches.

Personally, having experienced the Tesla world for over a decade, I would personally prefer they deliver all the features they sold me on delivery day (so many people are still waiting on the full-self-driving they paid for in 2016 for example), then they just update the car with bug fixes and security patches for 15 years at least, while everything just works as it did on day 1. If there are new features, they should charge for them, but also support it. Getting features for free means their support on older hardware is not a priority as it doesn't not drive revenue.

I don't know if you have already experienced it, there are a lot functions for which you paid extra when purchasing. After three years you have to take out an extra subscription to be able to use them (this includes charging planner, radio plus, navigation plus, finder, voice pilot, risk radar, news, instruction booklet, weather, agenda, Spotify, Apple podcast, remote control to open and close, etc.). This is all covered by Porsche connect. I'm trying to figure out what still works after three years, given the list not very much anymore. I hope I can still drive.

Teslas come with 30 or 90 days of premium connectivity, then it's a paid subscription too. They do allow you to provide your own internet however (via hotspot) which is something Porsche should have done too.

All internet connected software needs continuous updates for security. This means there are people who need to be continuously working on it. The company either has to predict how long someone is going to be using the software, so for cars charge everyone for 30 years of engineering (there are 30 year old cars still on roads today), or a better solution is a subscription - keeps the original price low, each user only pays for what they use (if you scrap the car after 10 years, you save 20 years of subscription) and when not enough people are still using the subscription, you end of life the product. How you end-of-life a car product is a whole different topic, since any internet connected software not updated for security becomes easily hackable fairly quickly, and with car computers controlling everything from locking to driving, it can become a nightmare. Want an example of a bad scenario? Imagine a car with ADAS capabilities is internet connected but no longer updated. 3 years down the road, some kid downloads exploit scripts intended to hack Linux, but they work on a now unpatched car. The kid scans the internet to find a couple of thousand of those cars online. They run the scripts and gains root access to all those cars. As they try to tinker with it, they inadvertantly launch thousands of cars full throttle from wherever they are parked at the moment. Now imagine what a malicious state backed actor could do.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

I do really think us first gen owners should get a power boost. The power difference between the two are huge up to 200lbft of torque in some trims. There has never been that large of a power bump in a Porsche model facelift. Splitting the difference would show good faith for us first gen adopters.

Don’t get me wrong, it’d be nice but why should they? You paid for the car as it was specced (and advertised) at the time of the sale. Meanwhile, we got some sw updates that increased the range. But ok, Porsche in general is fairly friendly towards older generations of their cars, so we could see some retrofitting of the new capabilities. It would not be free, though, as they worked on these improvements and on testing the retrofit.

Premium brands like Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, etc. do that for free. And if you have delivered a product that does a perfect job then you don't need any updates,

Well, both of these points are wrong. @whitex covered it already in detail, I’m just reinforcing the point. You don’t get updates for free - you get bug fixes for a fixed period of time, and can buy extended support - for a limited total period of time. You do get security patches for free, for the active lifetime of the software. It’s extremely hard (in software) to maintain old code.And obviously there is no product that does “a perfect job”. It may have done one job perfectly, but something else was cut short.

 

[4thPcar]

since the miles per charge gets so improved for 2025 Taycan models, what we do with our existing Taycan model? I am very frustrated. My car isn’t even 1 year old.

I don't get your sentiment. I am also in San Diego. I go to LA and back on one charge. I go to Monterey CA or Las Vegas NV on 2 charges. I charge overnight in my garage and pay a fraction of what most owners pay to operate their vehicle. It's not healthy to covet what you don't have. Its healthy to be thankful for what you DO have.

Not that it matters, but I assume you paid far less than the MSRP for the '25 model.

 

[DHSMIAMI]

i’m not sure there is a single four-door luxury sedan out there that holds its value. I love my car just as much today as I did a couple weeks ago. It’s sexy, quick, drives amazing and my daily commute is only a couple miles home charging makes this effortless.. The newest and best thing willalways be around the horizon. Life is short. Enjoy it now..

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