Near disaster, but is it charger(s) or car? (UPDATE: it's the car)

Toby Pennycuff

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I had the same issue with EA chargers at the Sam's in Fort Worth. I went by to see if they were working and fortunately I didn't need a charge. Of the 4 chargers, 2 had blank panels (dead), and the other 2 had working panels, but the chargers showed as unavailable. I called EA and got the apology and promise to fix. Useless!
bushmg,

I assume these were the EA chargers over by Carswell? If so, glad yo hear about this now. I'm supposed to get my Taycan 4S in about two weeks from Autobahn. And I had planned to go over and check those chargers out.

We're in Cresson every weekend, so I'll look for a fellow Taycan owner when we go into Ft. Worth!

Toby
 
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dnanian

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So, the saga continues.

Car was at service for a few days, and they couldn't reproduce it, but they didn't go to an actual EA charger: they used their 800V charger at the dealership.

So, drove back out to an EA charger and immediately reproduced with various errors on the charger including VEHICLE_TIMEOUT, Charging_Permission_Failed and VEHICLE_PILOT_FAILURE.

(Note that if you're doing this stuff, make sure that even if you've had a failure, you go into the little "car control" window in the Porsche Charging app and click the stop square - otherwise, the system still sort of thinks that you're still charging and will fail more quickly.)

So, back to the dealer on Saturday: they're going to drive to an EA charger (not a short trip - at least 65 miles round trip to the closest one to them, and so I need to drive down there tonight to make sure I"ve tested with that specific charger) to reproduce (even though I've done this at all of the reasonable-distance chargers - three [four after tonight] at Seabrook, NH, Northborough, MA and Auburn, MA).

The dealer's Porsche contact said they've only seen this happen "one other time" (my question would be, what was the problem and solution), and so it's going to get bubbled up, etc.

More as I struggle through.
 


TriTaycan

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good luck! I’ll likely charge only rarely, but that Auburn charger off of 90 is one place I might go ... Hope it works! What did you put on your rear seats for the dog?
 
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dnanian

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good luck! I’ll likely charge only rarely, but that Auburn charger off of 90 is one place I might go ... Hope it works! What did you put on your rear seats for the dog?
I've tried the Auburn chargers and, unfortunately, none of them worked for me (but there are a lot of functional chargers there).

Unfortunately, the Providence chargers are mostly broken (both 350kW chargers are down, one cable on one of the chargers is broken, so only two possible connections) and neither worked with my car.

But at least it's documented.
 


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dnanian

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The saga continues to continue, as sagas do.

One of the Porsche folks drove the car to the charger and reproduced the issue (of course). No additional telemetry was collected, unfortunately; they just did what I'd been doing. I wish they'd accepted my extensively documented information, which would have saved over a week, but, I guess they had to eliminate the "owner is an idiot" factor.

I mean, I am an idiot, but I know how to charge a car.

Anyway, the information was submitted to Porsche along with the "ID of the charger" (not quite sure why that's relevant, but perhaps they're working with EA to gather diagnostics from the charger itself, something EA has claimed they were doing when they escalated each charge incident since the first, none of which resulted in anything, including any follow-up).

Hopefully part four of this will be the "thrilling conclusion" where "thrilling" means "not so thrilling" and "conclusion" means "it's fixed".
 
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dnanian

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So, Porsche Atlanta got in touch with my dealer (not with me), and the current diagnosis is "Bad HV Booster".

Here's what's weird about that. The HV Booster is what up-converts 400V to 800V, since the Taycan runs natively at 800V DC.

My car charges fine at 400V DC chargers (EVgo, ChargePoint, etc) and L2 chargers (Porsche's own, a Tesla HPWC with an adapter). But it won't charge at Electrify America chargers, which are 800V.

800V - and thus don't need boosting.

So, if it's a bad HV Booster, it's not affecting what it's "supposed" to do (boost the voltage).

The only thing I can come up with is that the problem is that it's not allowing itself to be "bypassed", and can't/shouldn't boost 800V, and tosses an error.

But this would mean it literally never worked.

How could a fundamental part of the car - 800V charging, its native charge rate, and a huge part of the pitch - get out of the factory having never been tested?

Note that during the intial "NPF" diagnosis, they indicated they tested the car in the shop with their own 800V charger. I'm pretty sure they didn't connect to a DC charger (or if they did, it was a 400V one), and rather connected to the equivalent of the HPWC. I don't think Porsche USA has had a chance to really train everyone thoroughly...and, frankly, I'm kind of (read "very") nervous about being the guinea pig for major brain surgery involving the charging setup. I mean, this isn't a training car you can goof up on - it's my car.
 
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louv

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I’m sure the process of replacing that part is well documented.

And, if it fails to fix it, they’ll do something different.
 
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dnanian

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I’m sure the process of replacing that part is well documented.
Well, sure. So's heart surgery. Would you like to be your cardiac surgeon's first bypass? :)
 

louv

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Well, sure. So's heart surgery. Would you like to be your cardiac surgeon's first bypass? :)
I volunteer in an animal shelter surgery clinic... I’ve photographed both dog and cat heart surgery. Oh, wait, that’s not what you asked.

As a chef once told me: Never Look In the Kitchen.

I prefer to live under the delusion that my car mechanic is perfect and will never fail. :)

I hope your mechanic was top of his class.
 
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dnanian

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I volunteer in an animal shelter surgery clinic...
My wife's a veterinarian, so I get plenty of that. And I know when she's doing a procedure for the first time, she spends a lot of time studying all the different things to do, and everything that goes right and wrong.

First time through, though, is nerve-wracking, and obviously takes more time. So, who knows—maybe it'll be a better result. Hope so.
 

louv

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Many props to your wife.

Yes, I’ve watched ours go through that same preparation. I personally believe cars are much easier to repair. I could fix our cars. I could never do surgery on a living being.
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