PCM Switched to Private Mode; Won't Deactivate

[bluedonkey]

Another connected car issue for PCM today. Drove out to my son's frisbee games this morning (Pacific Time) and all services were working properly. We had Apple Music running, and I was able to send the address to the car from my phone before leaving.

Came back to the car after his game to head home and Apple Music was showing as unavailable. Same for all the other connected services. Error said I needed to enable it in Connect Services. When we got home (and I could park), I want to the Connect settings and it was in private mode (shown as Active) and all the other services were marked inactive. Also, they were all greyed out - tapping the private mode line just caused a message to appear about it changing, but it never changed.

Tonight, I was able to get private mode deactivated in the car, but none of the other services came back on, and tapping them just left a spinner on screen. Tried checking from the app on my phone too, and it just reported that the car was still in private mode and that it needs to be turned off in the PCM settings.

No idea who is running the online services for Porsche, but this kind of thing really shouldn't happen. I do this for a living, and downtime measured in hours is very rare (and normally caused by a service provider outage that impacts a lot of sites). The gold standard, which is where I would expect a company like Porsche to at least be trying to hit, is about 5 minutes of downtime per year ("five nines" or 99.999% uptime).

Sponsored

 

[Fish Fingers]

I think the bigger issue is the complete lack of communication from Porsche about anything.

They are second only to Rolex in my experience - who never tell anyone anything.
They consider the public lucky that they may even be allowed to potentially buy one of their watches and if you don't like it, tough 5hit.
Never ever explain anything.

But watches are/will become very different to cars.....

Traditional car manufacturers will need to up their game in all areas, as a flood of disrupters flood the market. Some of them will be eyeing (wealthy) Porsche customers.

And performance will become less relevant as anyone can make a fast EV.

Customer experience will become ever more important and just sitting there explaining nothing, because of your historical status will count for less and less.

All imo.

 

[bluedonkey]

No surprises, but I got in the car yesterday (just to move it out of the garage so the kids could get their bikes out) and lo and behold, all my online services were back on, and everything was active again.

Either Verizon had their data network offline for ~24 hours (very, very unlikely, and I'm sure I would have heard more complaints about that) or Porsche had their online services down for that time. I've had no response at all from the email I sent support (other than the auto-responder telling me they had received it). I'm sure if I do hear back they won't accept that it was their servers.

Sponsored