anonymouse
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- Joined
- May 12, 2023
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- Location
- Oxfordshire UK
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- Taycan Turbo Sport Turismo J1.2
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Just back from a winter trip from the UK to the Black Forest (southern Germany). What a stunning place in winter; even more so in a Taycan Turbo Sport Turismo.
The journey was brilliant -- the car took every corner, fast straight, and steep hill with absolute ease. This really is an amazing vehicle. We were toasty warm (with a bit of preheating to get started) and I particularly appreciated the heated steering wheel. And of course it was essential to have winter tyres (which frustratingly meant the high cost of a set of 20" wheels).
Charging is now incredibly easy in most of Europe, and with the fast charging speed of the J1.2 Taycan (regularly hitting 250-320kW) you are off and running before you've taken a moment to stretch your legs. There are 300+ kW chargers dotted all along major routes. We used mainly Ionity but there were other options whenever we needed them. The Porsche Charging Service gave us good prices and we didn't need to use any other cards or apps - except for an overnight charge where Porsche has a blocking fee (quite unnecessary for an overnight AC charge) so we used the network's native app. We stopped at one Porsche Centre in Germany to charge and were disappointed that unlike the UK they had no refreshments and not even any customer seating. This time our route didn't take us near any of the Charging Lounges though,
We stayed at the Hotel Bareiss, our favourite hotel in the world. Superb hospitality in the tradition of a great German family-run hotel.
On the way we made a stop in Frankfurt where we stayed at the B'Mine Hotel, Frankfurt Airport -- a temple to German car culture, where you take your beautiful car up in a lift to a private parking space outside your room which in our case was on the 10th floor. All great fun, but also very convenient because all your "stuff" is right at the room when you need it!
On the French autoroutes, ALK/Innodrive shared much of the work, which was super relaxing. And of course when we hit the unrestricted autobahn (with good traffic, road and visibility conditions) we were able to let rip, comfortably cruising at 180-230km/h when conditions safely allowed (noting that ALK/Innodrive defaults to 209 km/h in unrestricted sections) and even hitting slightly over the car's specified top speed. The car delivered perfectly controlled performance throughout.
We managed to avoid the usual congestion around Antwerp by travelling at night on the way out and via Arras on the way back. And we timed some of our German autobahn travel for Sundays when trucks are banned. So as always, the worst part of the whole eurotrip was around London on the M25
Of course this is "Princess Porsche", with a high propensity to chuck a wobbly periodically, so on this trip we had four small panics:
- Charging port door refused to close just as we were about to board LeShuttle
- Yellow electrical warning, after I'd hammered it on the autobahn then plugged in to charge at 11kW DC
- Repeated disabling of automation features when it didn't like some very low early morning winter sunshine on the camera
- The boot stopping half way then automatically closing over and over on my back while I was trying to load luggage (a HAL9000 moment).
All of these were resolved by power off -- wait -- power on. But this level of software quality is simply not good enough and Porsche should by now be feeling ashamed of the number of unfixed bugs. I forgive almost all of it because of the exceptional driver experience, but there are definitely a few tense moments while we wait to see whether software and hardware errors fix themselves.
Our next road trip is to Portugal and the Picos, and we can't wait.
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