Charging Planning on Phone App is useless

[flowerman]

I have never taken my Macan 4S EV on a trip. And probably never will. I find trip planning in my neck of the woods impossible and thus have no faith that I will be able to find available charging stations on a trip. For example, here are the two charging stations nearest to me. Each have four 350kw stations. When I checked the app there appeared to be empty stalls. When I got to both, all four were occupied and cars waiting. How can you comfortably travel with an app that functions like this?

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[PrudentOcean]

In Porsche's defense, that's not their fault -- they use the data that they are provided by Electrify America.

If you're going on a road trip I would recommend Plugshare or ABRP (A Better Route Planner). While they don't necessarily have access to all the realtime utilization information of all the networks, they show far more charging networks than the My Porsche app does. Without that you may think there are no DC fast charging options when in reality they exist.

 

[flowerman]

Thank you VERY much. That is quite helpful.

 

[PSPJames]

We just took our first road trip from Palm Springs to Portland, OR and back (1100 miles each way). Granted, it was through CA which has a lot of charging options... but I did have one time that the PCM directed me to a closed station. Thankfully I was cross-checing with ABRP and the EA apps so i was able to divert to a new station. Of course now with the Tesla SC networking opening up it should be a lot simpler. Even here in town, last week I checked the EA app. Showed 4/4 chargers open, so I drove down to charge the car (10 minutes away). By the time I arrived, all 4 chargers were in use and the app showed 0/4 available...so it can change quite quickly!

 

[MatC21]

Worth mentioning that this is a US-only problem. Here in Central Europe the App works extremely reliably.

 

[Hut49]

Just drove down from Calais to French Riviera - My Porsche route planning app worked perfectly. There were only 2 issues: 1) the actual location of the EV charging bays on the main routes can be challenging- on one occasion we missed the route in was totally obscured and signposting was inadequate. We failed to find it and ended up back on the road. Luckily we had set a minimum of 20% charge at a EV charging location so could drive to the next one some 30km further on. 2) the road speed detection system is hopeless and often found it indicating 50 or 80 in 130/110km zones. Not a big issue perhaps but problematic when moving in an out of reduced speed roadwork areas. Other than those issues the drive was effortless and super enjoyable. My Porsche app tells me we averaged 2.8 miles / kWh on the 750 mile drive.

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