Experiences with Taycan vs. Model X Part 5: Efficiency and Charging

I drove the Tesla X for about two years in Los Angeles and did about 25.000 km. I was quite impressed about the consumption which was overall 22.6 kWh/100km.

Due to Covid I did only 5000 km with the Taycan. And we are comparing southern California climate with the winter months in Europe. The total average for the Taycan consumption so far is 26.8 kW/100km. This is actually quite good. Considering the much lower temperatures and much faster driving on the German Autobahn. I used RANGE-mode when I was travelling longer distance and was able to do around 150 km/h on those empty roads.

Charging actually is an experience with the Taycan. While the Tesla plans its routes along the Tesla owned SuperChargers, the Porsche also does very sophisticated route planing but along public chargers. This causes a lot of issues. Tesla chargers always work (one of many may be temporarily out of use, but generally they work), you just plug your car in and charging starts immediately. On your in vehicle map, you see the SuperChargers and also their occupation. I never had any bad surprises.

Charging with the Taycan is full of surprises:

• a whole bank of 6 Ionity chargers out of service
• charger not able to communicate with the car
• charging interrupted
• charger not accepting the Porsche charging card
• not able to register to the charger using the credit card

and on and on I could go.

Much less reliable and always a reason of concern. Whenever I approach a charger I am worried about whether it will work and if I will be able to unlock it. Here Tesla has a huge advantage with their proprietary fully controlled system.

If I manage to connect to an 800V fast charger (preferably from Ionity as they don't need authorisation through a card but are 'plug and charge' like Tesla) they do charge really fast. The screen shot below shows how I was able to load 40 kW in just 10 minutes. The charging planner normally plans for very short stops (10-15mins) and it even prepares the battery temperature to be optimal so that fastest charging is possible. The Tesla is fast too, but definitely slower than Porsche.

In summary, the Tesla clearly wins this chapter as it is a little bit (not as much as I had expected) more efficient but mainly because it gives a reliable charging experience which Porsche cannot deliver because of the fragmented charger landscape it has to live with.

This is the last chapter of this comparison and I need to come to a conclusion:

The Tesla wins by the number of chapter wins:

1. Recuperation - Porsche
2. ADAS - Tesla
3. Online Services - Tesla
4. Driving - Porsche
5. Charging and Consumption - Tesla

Anyhow, I love my Taycan and don't regret buying it. It is such a great machine to drive and puts so many smiles on my face on every drive.

Clearly the entire build quality and materials used in the Porsche are absolutely superior and other than with Tesla there is no such thing like re-boots with black screens in the middle of a drive (which can be a scary experience).

But: Charging infrastructure and its reliability need urgent improvement and the online services delivered by the Taycan are a huge disappointment, since they are slow and unreliable. This is a shame for Porsche and I hope it will be fixed very soon (with an over the air update!?).