Racing the Porsche Taycan from Berlin to Amsterdam
Since last Saturday I have been testing the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. You can read about my excitement in a previous blog. I tried many electric vehicles over the years and it’s only getting more interesting. Last year I beat the Tesla’s own navi planning. Setting my record Berlin - Amsterdam time at seven hours including a couple 10 minute charging breaks.
Today, Tuesday 21st of July I will try to beat that time using the Porsche Taycan and several Ionity 350kW chargers (most of them I used last year with the Tesla as well).
The plan
First let’s take a look at what Porsche recommends for the trip today:
As you can see the Porsche planner is, in my opinion conservative.
What I intend to prove is that when the infrastructure is there anything is possible. Building your own charging plans, taking speed as serious as possible. You can actually treat this vehicle as if it wasn’t electric. It actually charges that fast. Just to show you an example of the possibilities. Here is what I created with some manual changed settings at A Better Routeplanner.
A new plan?
As you can see ABRP is a lot quicker virtually, compared to the Porsche planner by Chargetrip.
I don’t feel that the above plan actually makes a lot of sense. The Fastned charger will probably max out around 150kW and even the Allego charger is suboptimal. As you can see any planner has difficulties when you actually intend to race. Last year I tested the Tesla completely manual. It recommended us to stay at the Supercharger near Hannover for 50 minutes, which would’ve never supplied us with sufficient energy to actually drive fast afterwards. It even told us to turn around when we were heading out again to Fastned.
Tweaking ABRP
Let’s select one of the Ionity chargers and set it to preferred. See what happens:
Apparently Ionity exclusive usage on ABRP doesn’t give us the ideal projection.
Changing settings to prefer Ionity, but no exclusive usage then. As you can see, it will just get messier and this is because I changed speed settings to 120% / 190km/h max. The truth is we’ll have to run this game ourselves. As with Formula 1 pitstops, everything needs to be perfected, my mate will jump out the car swipe the charging card while I plug in etc. Every second counts. Running to toilets while wearing masks, surviving traffic jams. We noticed on the way to Berlin last Saturday there’s much more roadworks going on then last year.
The challenge is here. Are you watching?
The dream
Part 1
Since escaping Berlin is strictly maxed out at 80km/h - and lots of roadworks will be in our face.
I have high hopes we can make it to the newest Ionity station on the route near Hannover in one go. By the time we pass Magdeburg we have to decide based on GOM (Guess-o-meter, or predicted range left) and previous consumption if we go for it or not! There is the Ionity station that I used since 2018 but I might skip it for the first time today.
Part 2
Since I think Ionity Salzbergen is too big of a high speed jump, we’ll stop at Auetal.
This does actually mean our first charging break could be five minutes or less, running around to find a spare tree. It will be racing pitstop style, no jokes. This is serious!
Part 3
The last high speed part, The Netherlands will be close now. If we arrive before 7PM at the border in The Netherlands we can only do 100km/h so it’s important we arrive at 19:00 sharp.
Since The Netherlands nowadays (new 2020 regulations) only allows 130km/h after 7PM we have to time our trip more carefully. We should have a better idea about consumption now. The GOM will be predicting based on our high German speeds and luckily there is a Fastned close to Amsterdam (and Ionity near Apeldoorn for example) so if we gamble and lose, there are always options! Any charging stop costs time though.
Part 4
As you can see the last part will at least ask 60% or more of the battery so we can at least grab a snack during this charging break of hopefully 15 minutes or so!
Polarsteps (see below) will be live as will Glympse. Don’t expect much on Twitter or Instagram, that will be after we arrive in Amsterdam. The plan is to leave Berlin (Hermannplatz) at 2PM sharp. And arrive in Amsterdam before 9PM. Don’t miss it!