Seriously considering picking up a Taycan, and am looking into the EA charging network details. While I intend to charge at home for daily driving, the car for me absolutely has to be able to do road trips in the PNW.
Was hoping to get some insights on 3 questions I had:

• Does anybody have experience with the plug & charge in the '21 Taycan yet? Specifically, wondering whether that automatically links/activates the free charging, or whether you still have to do the whole Porsche Connect app thing to trigger free charging. Hoping to get the seamless experience a la Tesla Superchargers.
• What's the actual state of the charging network nowadays? I know they had a bumpy start, and I was expecting it to get better, but most apps/sites that track status show a lot of "under repair". Is that reflective of what's it like out there - or is the data in the apps just out of date?
• Are there any incentives for cars to use the slower chargers? Most sites look like they have 3-5 stalls, but only 1-2 will be 350kw. With the flood of Mach-E and ID.4 coming, my nightmare scenario would be finding the single 350kw blocked by a car sipping along at 100kw. And if the 150kw chargers are 400V, that would also affect whether that charger option is basically mandatory.

Thanks in advance for any pointers or insights! Much appreciated.

 

Most of my driving is local but have tried the EA 150w chargers a few times. The Porsche Connect app worked perfectly and was simple to use. Basically just plug in, open the app and press the charge button on the app. It’s that simple. The free 30 minutes applies automatically. There are YouTube videos you can find with a quick search that show the experience. With a 150w charger you can go from 5-85% in just over 20 minutes. There are varied comments about user experiences with the EA chargers and would suggest you do more research on the chargers in the areas you think you will need them.

 

there is some sort of conflict between the onboard 19.2 unit and the ability to plug and charge, I have never been able to initiate a charge without going through the app routine. and one time because the app got hung up I couldn't get a charge started and had to use a greenlots unit until while charging there I figured out that I needed to reboot the app to clear it.

at this point in time you will not have that seamless, tesla like charging session.

at the EA chargers you will occasionally run into a charger that is offline but since there still aren't many cars using the units moving to a working unit isn't a big problem.
at this point in time there are no incentives and I've noticed that there isn't all that much difference stepping down to the 150 kw units because I use the battery friendly setting that limits the 350kw units which could deliver up to 270 to only taking 200 kw.

things are improving but that doesn't help when you are trying to charge and have to contact EA for them to sometimes force a unit to work.
the bottom line is to not be afraid of getting the car because of the EA charging concerns.

 

After the major EA update last summer, their reliability has dramatically improved. The majority of the "under repair" sites are related to the CHAdeMO plugs. It seems like they still have some issues to resolve with CHAdeMO, but to be honest it's a dying format and maybe they aren't very motivated to spend a lot of time fixing.

EA's network coverage is probably similar to Tesla's Supercharger network in 2018. They also have 100's of more sites that are going live in the next 6 months. My guess is between EA and the other major charging networks they will collectively surpass Tesla's network in 18-24 months. In some areas of the country the non-Tesla networks have better coverage. Also, even if the Mach-E and ID.4 are huge hits, it will be a couple of years before they reach the current traffic levels of Tesla.

I miss the plug and charge feature of our Tesla, but like others have commented the Porsche app is pretty easy to use. It adds a minute or two to charging but it's not that big of a deal. The other major network I regularly use is Chargepoint (they have a lot of sites in Colorado) and I simply activate through my iPhone's Wallet and it has worked great.

Last weekend my wife and I drove our Taycan and Audi E-tron from Colorado to Phoenix using only EA chargers and only running into one charging issue along the way. One of the chargers the E-tron was plugged into errored twice during the charging process. We moved chargers and no other issues. Otherwise the 880 mile road trip was as good as our Tesla Supercharging experience, but with much higher charging speeds. I was really impressed how fast both the Taycan and our E-tron charged. Way better than our Tesla Model X 100D. Our longest stop was 29 minutes to charge the Audi to 98% for a long leg. Otherwise the majority of stops were in the 15-20 minute range. We are headed back in another week.

 

What was the Audi E-tron's range?