When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
That really is excellent!! I'm getting a fairly consistent 22-24 miles on electric only but half of my "commute" to the golf course is on the freeway at 75 mph and the other half is mostly on a highway driving around 50-60 mph. However my outside temperature has varied from 90 F down to around 55 F recently. There was a post I saw a while back (maybe on the Taycan forum) that indicated best distance would be achieved with a steady 50 mph or so.
Did an experiment on Saturday. Fully charged, left my garage with 44km reach in the display and with the heaters off (-2°c outside), i managed 41km... all in one go with very little stop and go.
I have not seen my cars fully charged with more than 40km in reserve for long long time.........With the colder weather, sometimes I only get 31 or 32km when fully charged. And practically only like 15km of full electric ride in the hilly city roads.
Do you guys use the timer function for charging? What's the benefit in using that? For me, I just plugged in everytime and let it charged. I don't take out the charger even it is fully charged. I suppose the charger will stop and cause no damage to the battery life?
Another different question that I have - Do you find that the quality of the surround camera is bad in the dark, especially in the rain? I literally can't see much with the surround camera when it is completely dark out there. I have to backup really slow and rely on the sensors. I can see much more with my wife's BMW X5. Don't know if it is just my car or it is the same with all Porsche surround camera??
I understand that it's fine -- and even encouraged -- to leave the car plugged in even when fully charged. The only reservation brought up in this forum has been to unplug it in thunderstorms.
As for general highway driving, yes, Hybrid Auto mode is best for gas mileage; you'll find the ICE constantly coming on and then going off again when you coast or brake, as the car will use its computer software to try to have the electric-motor battery pack go down fairly slowly in charge over time. I use E-Charge occasionally when I'm getting low on battery and I want all-electric (quiet) mode when I get to certain urban areas, including in my work parking lot and my residential neighborhood and entering my garage. Since I last filled up on gas a couple weeks ago, I've averaged 47 mpg over 325 miles, according to my gauge, and I still have 65% left in the gas tank. I get around 20 mpg in E-Charge mode, and around 28 mpg long-distance in Hybrid Auto mode.
I'm get roughly the same results here in "Toronto" Ontario; most of my driving consists of chauffering the kids to scheool, going to work, home for lunch and back to work again etc... This usually eats up 34km (~21 miles) rather quickly and for now, I rarely do long highway cruising and my favourite mode is Sport Plus while it's recharging the battery for additional short night time trips. My daughter notices that I smile more SP mode too! :-)
What's helped me alot is bringing 220v to the garage for charging since I am in and out of the house alot. What used to be 12+hrs to fullly charge the battery has gone down to 2.5 - 3 hrs. I have the upgraded 7.2kw charger in the car.
So.... I'm just enjoying the car first and then challenging myself to charge as often as I can to see how far I can go between fill ups.
I do use the timer so that most (if not all of) of my charging time is during off peak hours. Every once in a while I will cancel it by pressing the timer (off) button on the car so that it immediately charges.
I have a follow up: If I know the next morning is going to be cold, I will pre-heat the car so that it's warm when we get in. I've noticed that my cold weather range drops from 34 to 29. This was before I installed the fast charger. Does our car charge if plugged in and in pre-heat / pre-cool mode?
-- Mike
I use the timer to do my charging because I am also on the Time of Use Plan with PG&E and if I charge my car between 11 pm and 7 am it only costs me $.12/kwh. In reality it costs my nothing to charge my car as my annual electric bill due to my solar panels is close to zero. Here in Northern California we are now seeing colder temperatures and it does get down into the 40's or so in my garage during the charging so I have seen a drop in indicated miles available on a full charge from a high last summer of 34 down to around 26 now. However I don't actually get that mileage because I do about half of my driving on the freeway at 75 mph so my actual mileage is more like around 23-25 now. My total indicated mileage with about 4300 miles is 40 mpg but that is not really accurate since the most you get credit in the calculation for is 99 mpg.
My car just went if to have the sun visor replaced (the little clip broke off). While it was there they also did the PDK Transmission software update. I wasn't really having any problem with the PDK except that when I was coming to a stop the shift into first gear sometimes made the car lurch forward somewhat and that could be disconcerting if I didn't have my foot on the brake hard. Now with the software update the lurch has gone away and it is very smooth. I never did hear any clunking as others have reported but I didn't like the lurching so I'm glad that has been eradicated.
I use the timer to do my charging because I am also on the Time of Use Plan with PG&E and if I charge my car between 11 pm and 7 am it only costs me $.12/kwh. In reality it costs my nothing to charge my car as my annual electric bill due to my solar panels is close to zero. Here in Northern California we are now seeing colder temperatures and it does get down into the 40's or so in my garage during the charging so I have seen a drop in indicated miles available on a full charge from a high last summer of 34 down to around 26 now. However I don't actually get that mileage because I do about half of my driving on the freeway at 75 mph so my actual mileage is more like around 23-25 now. My total indicated mileage with about 4300 miles is 40 mpg but that is not really accurate since the most you get credit in the calculation for is 99 mpg.
I think that the car DOES calculate based on gas consumption; the 99 mpg figure seems to be there for short-term driving because they didn't allow for the counter to go higher than "99.0". (If you only drive close to home and use, say, 0.1 gallon of gas in driving 500 miles, that is equal to 5000 mpg, which is somewhat meaningless, so there's no real point in displaying figures higher than 99 mpg here; the Porsche engineers probably figured that was a good cut-off point.)
I have done some of my own calculations, and I get close to what the computer says; after all, it's very simple: you simply divide the number of miles driven by the number of gallons of gas used... The amount of miles driven in all-electric doesn't factor in to mpg calculations -- only the amount of gas consumed. For driving only in all-electric (and in all-EV cars), mpg cannot be calculated because the denominator (amount of gasoline) is zero. You can figure out how much energy is used, of course, off the grid, but that's much more complex. I think that all that we are concerned about with PHEVs is the amount of gas used, and thus mpg.
Yes, everything you wrote makes perfect sense. I haven't kept an accurate account of my gasoline purchases, but it does seem reasonable to me that my indicated 40 mpg is about right. It continues to increase as I drive mostly electric. I will be taking a longer trip in the next month so after that most likely the mpg will drop somewhat.
I'm get roughly the same results here in "Toronto" Ontario; most of my driving consists of chauffering the kids to scheool, going to work, home for lunch and back to work again etc... This usually eats up 34km (~21 miles) rather quickly and for now, I rarely do long highway cruising and my favourite mode is Sport Plus while it's recharging the battery for additional short night time trips. My daughter notices that I smile more SP mode too! :-)
What's helped me alot is bringing 220v to the garage for charging since I am in and out of the house alot. What used to be 12+hrs to fullly charge the battery has gone down to 2.5 - 3 hrs. I have the upgraded 7.2kw charger in the car.
So.... I'm just enjoying the car first and then challenging myself to charge as often as I can to see how far I can go between fill ups.
-- Mike
I got an average of 28 mpg on my recent trip. It was very mixed driving conditions, and there were times I used e-charge to give the battery some range.
To me, the car seems to operate better when it has sufficient battery for at least a few miles range. It’s smoother off the line and much more responsive. Given this, I used e-hold quite a bit on the trip. As hybrid auto allowed the battery to deplete, I engaged e-hold to keep the charge at about 5 miles range. Once I got into town centers, this was perfect because I could operate on EV mode, then e-charge the battery back up to that range while back on the highway.
It’s really a good bit of fun experimenting with all the options we have in this car. I dont use sport of sport plus as much yet. But I always drive with the car in lowered suspension.
Last edited by Bladerunner1963; 12-01-2018 at 06:53 AM.
Okay, I just did a quick trip out to get a breakfast sandwich. It’s only 5am foggy and dark so I am going to check out night vision. (Short of it; it saw and warned of two deer on the side of road I didnt see....very good). The plan was to do the trip on pure EV since I had a full 24 mile range and the round trip was 15.7 miles.
The entire trip was backroads and I averaged 28mph. I had the car in EV mode and it stay there most of the time. But, for some reason, occasionally during the trip the gas engine would kick in for short periods. This wasn’t due to aggressive driving, I was taking it easy on dark, foggy backroads. I’m just curious why the gas motor would kick in when I had more than enough range for the trip. My mpg was 77.5
Unless you had the car in hybrid mode the ICE should not have come on to the best of my knowledge. For me it only comes on when I'm down to about 2 miles of range. Once the ICE comes on it will stay on for a good five minutes or so until the engine has fully warmed up, then it will switch back and forth as it deems appropriate. Once the ICE comes on the car automatically switches from EV mode to Hybrid mode.
Okay, I just did a quick trip out to get a breakfast sandwich. It’s only 5am foggy and dark so I am going to check out night vision. (Short of it; it saw and warned of two deer on the side of road I didnt see....very good). The plan was to do the trip on pure EV since I had a full 24 mile range and the round trip was 15.7 miles.
The entire trip was backroads and I averaged 28mph. I had the car in EV mode and it stay there most of the time. But, for some reason, occasionally during the trip the gas engine would kick in for short periods. This wasn’t due to aggressive driving, I was taking it easy on dark, foggy backroads. I’m just curious why the gas motor would kick in when I had more than enough range for the trip. My mpg was 77.5
I have experienced similar occasions when the ICE kicks in with no real reason while in EV mode. Not often, but a few times. When this happens, I was not doing any aggressive quick accelerations, just pulling out from a stop sign. When it happens, I always try to do a data collection in my mind of what is going on that may possibly cause this. I never come up with anything definitive, but one time I wondered if because it was so cold out (Pittsburgh, PA area) maybe it was kicking the ICE on to give more ability to warm the cabin and possibly to have a warm engine when needed. It seems that I notice this happening more when the temps are down in the twenties or lower (Fahrenheit). Thanks for the observation and possibly getting to the bottom of this.