New 4S, Low Range…

[Dollymite]

It sounds like you set the minimum charge to 85% and failed to set up a timer.

The minimum charge is exactly that... it will charge immediately to the minimum. And it will keep charging unless you give it a reason to stop.

The only way to get it to stop is with a timer. You must set a time and charge percentage. I set mine as follows:

Profile: Minimum charge set to 25%, which is the lowest you can set it, with "optimized charging"

Timer: charge to 85% at 5AM. It will start charging several hours before and finishes right at 85% at 5AM and stops charging there.

There is no "maximum charge" setting, so this is the workaround everyone uses.

Right! Thank you so much. I actually would never have worked that out, I’ve been going round in circles with it! Is it me or is it quite odd that you’d not just be able to set a minimum and maximum charge?!

Sponsored

 

[Dollymite]

Most critical factor is how you drive. If you drive fast and hammer it everywhere, you’ll get 210-220 miles. If you want to get 250+ miles, you need to be easy on the go pedal. OP after you put a couple thousand miles on the car, check your TOTAL average speed SINCE PURCHASE in the app. Mid 20’s, good range. Mid 30’s, not so much.

The chances of me hammering it are mostly pretty low because I’ve either always got the kids in the back or I’m down some country lane that’s not as wide as the car.
Thank you, will check my total average as suggested once I’ve done some proper mileage!

 

[AmpedUp]

Right! Thank you so much. I actually would never have worked that out, I’ve been going round in circles with it! Is it me or is it quite odd that you’d not just be able to set a minimum and maximum charge?!

There are MANY threads here about confused owners trying to work this out. It is seriously the dumbest setup. I should be able to program what hours I want to allow it to charge (to take advantage of off-peak hours) and a target percentage. Maybe, just maybe a minimum charge it should charge to right away, even during peak hours.

They made it unnecessarily complicated, and actually degraded the resulting functionality. I want it to start charging immediately at 8pm when off peak STARTS so that it's ready to go ASAP. Instead, I need to program it to finish at 5am, which is when off peak hours end, and maybe starts the charge at midnight and may or may not finish completely by 5am. Really bad approach and everyone hates it.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

There are MANY threads here about confused owners trying to work this out. It is seriously the dumbest setup. I should be able to program what hours I want to allow it to charge (to take advantage of off-peak hours)

Check.

and a target percentage.

Check.

Maybe, just maybe a minimum charge it should charge to right away, even during peak hours.

Check.
Sounds like it does do everything you want already?

They made it unnecessarily complicated, and actually degraded the resulting functionality. I want it to start charging immediately at 8pm when off peak STARTS so that it's ready to go ASAP. Instead, I need to program it to finish at 5am, which is when off peak hours end, and maybe starts the charge at midnight and may or may not finish completely by 5am. Really bad approach and everyone hates it.

(I'll make one more attempt, indulge me.) It seems to me that everyone expects the system to support a) a target charge value by b) a specific time (ie when they leave). That is, both are targets - in the 'outcome'/result sense. You also have the ability to specify a preferred charging interval.

I don't get, for the life of me, why people are obsessed with when charging actually starts. If you declared the expected results/targets, isn't the how it gets there irrelevant?

In your example, you'd use:
- a (home) profile with min target (to be reached immediately) and an 8pm-5am preferred charging interval
- a timer with target charging level and whenever you want to leave - say 85% and 8am.

The car will figure out exactly how much current to draw and when. Note it'll try to optimize for your preferred interval and reach 85% by 5am, but it might leave a couple % closer to your departure time/8am (so stops at 5am and starts again before 8am).

 

[AmpedUp]

Check.


Check.


Check.
Sounds like it does do everything you want already?


(I'll make one more attempt, indulge me.) It seems to me that everyone expects the system to support a) a target charge value by b) a specific time (ie when they leave). That is, both are targets - in the 'outcome'/result sense. You also have the ability to specify a preferred charging interval.

I don't get, for the life of me, why people are obsessed with when charging actually starts. If you declared the expected results/targets, isn't the how it gets there irrelevant?

In your example, you'd use:
- a (home) profile with min target (to be reached immediately) and an 8pm-5am preferred charging interval
- a timer with target charging level and whenever you want to leave - say 85% and 8am.

The car will figure out exactly how much current to draw and when. Note it'll try to optimize for your preferred interval and reach 85% by 5am, but it might leave a couple % closer to your departure time/8am (so stops at 5am and starts again before 8am).

Your "Check"s require "*"
* Will charge ONLY during off-peak hours IF you have Home Energy Manager installed, otherwise, you need to have a high-amp charger. Why? Because even if you set a timer, if the battery is very low and you have a low-amp charger, it will start during peak hours if it has to in order to hit your target percent and time. This was a problem for me at my last house. It might start at 4pm if I had timer set for 5am. Off-peak didn't start until 8pm.

So unfortunately, no, it doesn't do what I want.

They need to just say "minimum", "maximum" and "allowed charging hours". That's all it should be. Not timers (who wants it to charge at the last possible minute anyway???), profiles, "preferred charging times" (which does nothing by the way without spending a fortune on other hardware that requires professional installation). It's confusing and still won't do what most people want.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

Your "Check"s require "*"
* Will charge ONLY during off-peak hours IF you have Home Energy Manager installed, otherwise, you need to have a high-amp charger. Why? Because even if you set a timer, if the battery is very low and you have a low-amp charger, it will start during peak hours if it has to in order to hit your target percent and time. This was a problem for me at my last house. It might start at 4pm if I had timer set for 5am. Off-peak didn't start until 8pm.

So unfortunately, no, it doesn't do what I want.

I'm not sure I fully follow, or I don't know what is 'high' or 'low' in this case. If your car requires x kWh to reach your desired target, the calculation is a trivial one: x /voltage x amperage. No amount of customization of the interface can make up for the fact that you need 'time' for 'low' power. ?

From your description it sounds like you were on L1 (120V max)?

They need to just say "minimum", "maximum" and "allowed charging hours". That's all it should be. Not timers (who wants it to charge at the last possible minute anyway???), profiles, "preferred charging times" (which does nothing by the way without spending a fortune on other hardware that requires professional installation). It's confusing and still won't do what most people want.

Sorry, I sense there may be some confusion. I don't have an HEM, I'm not sure if you refer to L2/240V as 'high-amp' but installing a 240V outlet did require professional installation in my case. I can charge overnight from almost any starting state (never tried below 15%) to any target I would need (typically 85% but have done 100%/full too). My preferred charging interval is 12am-6am, and the car will reach any target in that interval from a simple 50A outlet (40A effective, 8.7kW power to the car). And, as you said, I'm only configuring "minimum" (in the profile), "maximum" (== target, in the timer) and "allowed charging hours" (== "preferred charging interval" in the profile). ?‍

 

[Alfa]

How it’s set up now is indeed unnecessarily complicated. The idea of charging the car to the last minute is absolutely over engineered and dumb. Who cares if the car sits a couple of hours or a night at that maximum desired charge level? It’s a useless use case.

Doing the calculations manually is just a workaround for an otherwise terrible user interface.

The timer makes sense for defining a cheaper night rate. Minimum makes sense for having a safety margin even outside that time range (or to have a safety margin at a destination without a charger). And maximum makes sense to help battery health. In fact the maximum should just be a bool (healthy home charging vs maximum range for road trips) and Porsche should decide what a healthy maximum is (they have the data).

The fact that I still don’t know what Minimum actually does is ridiculous. Its not setting the safety margin at a destination (that seems to be hardcoded at 20%). And if it’s the minimum for outside hours of the timer setting than WHY is it not in the timer configuration menu???

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

How it’s set up now is indeed unnecessarily complicated. The idea of charging the car to the last minute is absolutely over engineered and dumb.

I’m pretty sure this is actually a picture of me listening to users who find the charging functionality to be confusing. (Might be someone else, though, I still have a head full of hair.)

 

[Alfa]

I’m pretty sure this is actually a picture of me listening to users who find the charging functionality to be confusing. (Might be someone else, though, I still have a head full of hair.)

I mean you cannot deny that the UI can be significantly improved, if there are so many people confused about it.
Sure as a human one can go though the pain and learn workarounds by doing manual calculations but this is what the computer should do. Computers were designed to do this, they are faster at it and don’t do mistakes. Having the UI as is now is just a form of inexperienced software engineering and first and foremost bad procedure to test, detect and fix them before they ship, been there done it myself.

 

[AmineS]

The dealer gave me very good advice, the car uses the last 600km to calculate the average kwh/mile or km and you need ca 1'000 km to have the regen activated, and then a realistic energy consumption. now it's ca 450 km at 100% SOC, and it's driven normally, not in a soft way

 

[f1eng]

The idea of charging the car to the last minute is absolutely over engineered and dumb.

It isn't dumb, it gives the opportunity for the software to optimise the battery temperature for when you leave, giving better efficiency and, possibly, better performance as soon as you leave home.

Charging to 100% and leaving it to cool isn't best.

 

[Alfa]

It isn't dumb, it gives the opportunity for the software to optimise the battery temperature for when you leave, giving better efficiency and, possibly, better performance as soon as you leave home.

Charging to 100% and leaving it to cool isn't best.

Its engineers overthinking the problem, by optimizing for a minority use case AND at the same time making it worse for everyone else. Sure when one lives in the bitter cold north without a garage, there is a good use case here. But who aside from the actual test drivers and a couple of people after launch are using it? And even than it’s still plugged and could use the “umbilical” to keep the battery at a healthy temperature range, making it less green from an energy usage perspective.

Look I wouldn’t be so frustrated if the general use cases would would work great and the timer feature is an addition to that, but it’s not.

Good UI is when the software will support the user. A Tesla for example will have a pop up message and tells the driver to use the navigation feature next time when you drive to a charger instead of just plugging it in.

It’s called a User Interface after all and not an Engineering Interface.

I think I vaguely remember now that in one of the launch videos they mentioned how the test drivers encountered range issues in the cold climates and the software engineers fixed it very quickly in a day or so by adding that timer feature. That’s what it feels like: very prototype(ish), it’s probably been like this ever since without revision.

 

[AmpedUp]

I'm not sure I fully follow, or I don't know what is 'high' or 'low' in this case. If your car requires x kWh to reach your desired target, the calculation is a trivial one: x /voltage x amperage. No amount of customization of the interface can make up for the fact that you need 'time' for 'low' power. ?

From your description it sounds like you were on L1 (120V max)?

You are leaving out the "hours" part of kWh. Voltage x amps / 1000 = kW. Porsche's standard 240 volt x 20 amp mobile charger that comes with the car yields 4.8 kW (since the software update that derated the device). You also lose about 7% between the charger and the battery, which means it charges the battery at about 4.4-4.5 kW. The Performance Battery Plus has a capacity of about 93.4 kWh. At the charge rate of 4.45 kW, it would take 93.4/4.45 x 75% = nearly 16 HOURS to charge the batter from 10% to 85%. If you are willing to risk melting the device, you can override the device to 40 amps, but even then it would take nearly 8 hours.

Now, even charging at 240 amps, if my battery is "low" - say 10% - and I set a timer for 5am completion with an 85% SoC, the car will start charging at about 1pm the day before. That's true even if I tell it my preferred charging hours, unless I have HEM.

So no, I was not charging on L1, and I still had to manually hook up the car during off peak hours if I only wanted it to charge during those hours.

Sorry, I sense there may be some confusion. I don't have an HEM, I'm not sure if you refer to L2/240V as 'high-amp' but installing a 240V outlet did require professional installation in my case. I can charge overnight from almost any starting state (never tried below 15%) to any target I would need (typically 85% but have done 100%/full too). My preferred charging interval is 12am-6am, and the car will reach any target in that interval from a simple 50A outlet (40A effective, 8.7kW power to the car). And, as you said, I'm only configuring "minimum" (in the profile), "maximum" (== target, in the timer) and "allowed charging hours" (== "preferred charging interval" in the profile). ?‍

I never referred to L2 as "high amp". When I said "high amp" I meant "high amp" and didn't refer to the voltage at all. Your charge rate of 40 amps is what I would consider "high amp". You might start running into the issue I describe if you used a 30 amp 240v plug, delivering 24 amps to the charger, and about 5.4 kW to the car. You would only be able to charge about 32 kW during your preferred times of 12-6am. In that case, even with a timer, the Taycan would occasionally start charging outside of your preferred hours (say when you got home after a road trip with 15% charge), again, unless you had HEM (which almost no one does).

My main point in all this is that Porsche overcomplicated the charging instructions. Most people do find setting up charging confusion. And even with all that complexity, the car still won't do what most people want it to... start charging immediately whenever certain time windows START to whatever percentage they want. Instead, the car starts charging whenever it thinks it might need to (estimated) in order to FINISH at whatever percentage and time the driver wants. It's completely backwards.

For you and your specific needs, it doesn't seem to matter. You never drive the car between 12am and 5am, so you are happy to wait until - for example - 3:57am for your car to begin charging if that's when it decides to do. Plus your charging speed is fast enough and you typically come home with a SoC high enough that the car never starts the charge before 12am. But not everyone has the same needs. If the Taycan's charging worked the way I describe, your car would START charging at 12am, and finish sometime in the night BEFORE 5am. It would charge only during your preferred timeframe, and it would be ready to go earlier. That's a good thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, and it doesn't work for all people. You? Sure. Me? Not at my old house. It was always trying to charge during peak hours, so I was always having to run out and plug in or unplug my car to charge when I wanted.

I hope that makes more sense why I think they designed the charging settings poorly.

 

[AmpedUp]

It isn't dumb, it gives the opportunity for the software to optimise the battery temperature for when you leave, giving better efficiency and, possibly, better performance as soon as you leave home.

Charging to 100% and leaving it to cool isn't best.

It could still do this with a departure timer as a totally separate feature (e.g., "warm my seat, steering wheel, and battery at 5am"), without causing all the other charging confusion and charging functionality issues being discussed here. Besides, that is such a minor benefit as to be nearly meaningless in comparison to bad user interface, bad user experience, and higher cost to actually charge the vehicle (if the timer causes it to charge on-peak). But great! At least my battery is a bit warm a bit sooner!

In other words, you are right that is a nice feature to have on a timer. However, it is not necessary to compromise charging to have the battery pre-warmed at a specified time. The function to pre-heat the battery and the function to charge the battery can be (and should be) mutually exclusive. By combining them into one, the engineers made the charging experience worse.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

You are leaving out the "hours" part of kWh. Voltage x amps / 1000 = kW. Porsche's standard 240 volt x 20 amp mobile charger that comes with the car yields 4.8 kW (since the software update that derated the device). You also lose about 7% between the charger and the battery, which means it charges the battery at about 4.4-4.5 kW. The Performance Battery Plus has a capacity of about 93.4 kWh. At the charge rate of 4.45 kW, it would take 93.4/4.45 x 75% = nearly 16 HOURS to charge the batter from 10% to 85%. If you are willing to risk melting the device, you can override the device to 40 amps, but even then it would take nearly 8 hours.

Now, even charging at 240 amps, if my battery is "low" - say 10% - and I set a timer for 5am completion with an 85% SoC, the car will start charging at about 1pm the day before. That's true even if I tell it my preferred charging hours, unless I have HEM.

I haven't left anything out, and in fact you simply put numbers into my equation. It seems that we agree that time needed to charge is capacity (as in energy delivered)/power. We also seem to agree that the preferred charging interval may be too short, and my assertion was that there is no way any user interface can go around that basic fact.

My main point in all this is that Porsche overcomplicated the charging instructions. Most people do find setting up charging confusion. And even with all that complexity, the car still won't do what most people want it to... start charging immediately whenever certain time windows START to whatever percentage they want. Instead, the car starts charging whenever it thinks it might need to (estimated) in order to FINISH at whatever percentage and time the driver wants. It's completely backwards.

Fair. I attempted (here and in other threads, along with many other posters) to convince you that the modeling of the charging functionality is sensible and rational. I do agree, though, that this is a subjective (on my part) opinion, and my trying to convince you that it should make sense isn't helpful.

To me, a timer is a countdown - much like one you'd use on an oven. The charging interval is like a delayed start on a dishwasher (I apologize for the eye-roll-inducing analogies), and the combination of these two is meant to avoid the need for the user to do calculations of any sort (like energy needed etc. - imagine if you needed to calculate how much caloric energy needs to be dispensed for a roast to be ready when the guests arrive). Not only that, but the split between profiles ('what' to do at 'location') and timers ('when do you need it') is a powerful and elegant way to model charging. IMHO, of course.

What triggers me a bit are assertions that "most find it confusing" or, as @Alfa put it, that it's both half-assed and overengineered. I'll say it's a matter of perspective or expectations, and I'm happy to leave it at that.

If the Taycan's charging worked the way I describe, your car would START charging at 12am, and finish sometime in the night BEFORE 5am. It would charge only during your preferred timeframe, and it would be ready to go earlier.

Assuming your charging needs could be met in the 5 hrs (=22kWh), I am certain the car would behave exactly as you describe above. IME, it always tries to finish charging in the preferred interval, even if the timer fires later/after.

Sponsored