I Bought a Half Price Used Porsche Taycan and Drove it 2,300 Miles Home In Winter! - TheSmokingTIre

What I'm doing is not how most people spend their New Year's Eve, flying on a one-way ticket to Detroit to buy a used, depreciated German super EV wagon, sight unseen, and driving it with zero plan other than to get 2,300 miles home to California. My daily drive of 30-year-old Bentley project for a year has wrapped and that car will be for sale on Cars and Bids as soon as Daddy Doug makes a video. But I missed electric propulsion in Los Angeles and MUMMY I WANT AN ELECTRIC PORSCHE WAGON NOW so here we are, in a cab, to North Detroit, making sure the wire clears in the year of our car horde, 2024. And this is our new ride, it's a 2022 Taycan Cross Turismo 4, and in fact, as is YouTube tradition, it was literally the cheapest one in the country. And over the next five days, I hope to learn some things, a lot of things, about used EVs, about the state of our nation's charging infrastructure, and hopefully about hidden value. Woo! Okay. Uh, I have set my GPS to Los Angeles, and uh, here we go. Boys and girls, who am I kidding, boys, what's going on? I've bought a car. A new-to-me car. You see, after our little experiment with the Bentley, I got to thinking. I got to thinking that, I bet, there is hidden value somewhere else in this world. And right now, boy is that hidden value in Porsche Taycans. Woo! I bought this car, which is a 20- I bought this car, which is a 2022, with 26,000 miles on it, flat, for $64,000 plus tax. That is against an original MSRP of $139,000 three years ago. Half price, kids. And boy is this one loaded up. It's got extended two-tone leather. It's got air suspension, the big battery. It's got PDLS Plus. It's got adaptive cruise control. It's got the dual-screen system, 18-way sports seats, glass roof. It's got the goods. Now, of course, it's not a great color. That is a bummer. It's white. Maybe we'll change that at some point. But the plan right now is to evaluate a half-priced Taycan over the next three years. And why three years? Because this car comes with four years of unlimited mile warranty. That's right. I can abuse the miles on this car, rack them up, full coverage. And then I can still sell it with a year left so the next person buys with confidence. So that's the plan. I made a decision to get on a plane and fly to Detroit in the middle of winter by myself to drive an electric car 2,300 miles back to California. Genius or stupid is a very fine line. We have been driving for two hours and 40 minutes. And we have reached our first charging station in Kalamazoo. It is in Electrify, America. And it appears to be 150 kilowatts. And I set up my plug and charge before I left the dealer. So let's see if it works. But first, because it is 32 degrees and snowing outside, I need a proper jacket. Hopefully this goes well. I wanted to find out if it was better to fast charge at night before arriving at the hotel or the next morning over coffee. I decided to go for morning so I could warm the car and the battery for the long drive on that charge. The next morning, I cut it awfully close with the range buffer and learned an important lesson about fast charging in the very cold. That is not very fast for that and that. Now it's cold, but this really should be doing like 100 and something at this point. Eventually, I got to 80% and moved on. On advice from out-of-specs Kyle Connor, I just trusted Porsche's routing software to know where and when to stop. All right, finishing up my third stop of the day before noon. I found a spot off of I-80 here outside of Cedar Rapids. Shout out to the landmark grill and grind. Not a bad cheeseburger, honestly. Porsche's planning software only said I had to stop here for like 12 minutes before going on to the next stop, but I was hungry. So I went in for lunch and let's see what we're at once we come back from a rather relaxed meal. Oh, habibi, 89% and it's going slow now. It's down to 22 kilowatts because we're up at the top, but I got plenty of juice to continue to our next charge. And honestly, this is going to hopefully be pretty uneventful. So I hope you don't hear from me much. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Nebraska outside of Omaha, my last charge stop of the day. And I got to say a couple things. One, seats and ride on this car, amazing. Two, now that I got the plug and charge set up and I'm using the Porsche route planning system, ace. No stress. It's telling me where to stop and how long. And I have a 100% success rate with fast chargers being there and working when I get there. So that's good. And tomorrow the wife will be meeting me in Colorado. And hopefully the smoothness continues with my new used car. I spent the night in Lincoln and hit the road the next morning early. Good morning, everyone. Start of day three. I am departing Lincoln, Nebraska. Cool little place. Sort of a mildly progressive enclave in the middle of an otherwise very conservative state. And the home of one of my oldest friends, Mr. Chris Kingsley. And his wife, one of my other actually oldest friends, Jasmine. And they had, because it is relevant, they had a 110 plug at their house. So I was able to, even though it was only two kilowatts, I was able to leave the car charged in for eight hours overnight. And that trickle was enough juice that I can skip my first morning charge stop outside of Lincoln. And at, you guessed it, a Walmart. So rather than wake up, go, stop, charge, Porsche's software system now says that I am to drive 94 miles to my first charge stop instead of nine miles to my first charge stop. And so it saved me a stop. Now, it is 94 miles to the charge stop. I have 107 miles on the battery. So that really shouldn't be a problem unless Nebraska has some hidden mountains that I don't know about. Or, like yesterday, I have to drive into a 35 mile an hour headwind, which the car cannot predict. Having said that, Porsche's range gauge versus its estimates is accurate and trustworthy. So, so far, road tripping, full points for Porsche's combination route planner and plug and charge system. That is a self-contained universe that works. And then, of course, later today when we arrive to Denver, my wife Hannah's coming. So first part of the trip, that was the plan. I fly to Michigan and I drive the crappy parts. And no offense to the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska. I'm sure that there are lovely people that I could be hanging out with in every one of those states. But as far as driving through them, it is not eventful. There is very little to see besides dead trees and medium-sized gradients. Pro tip, though, if you must road trip 800 miles plus in an EV in a day, New Year's Day, beyond reproach. I mean, true luxury lane setup on the highway. Just got on the highway, set the adaptive cruise, and then never had to touch the pedal until it was time to exit the highway to charge again. Just, I mean, literally, I don't think I had to touch a pedal on the highway one time yesterday. It was quite luxurious. Because the car was parked in Chris's garage, plugged into a charger, and I set my departure timer, I minimized the losses that can happen from driving around 30 degrees, and it's 30 degrees outside. So if the car had stayed outside overnight, it would have cold-soaked the battery and it would have sapped some of my range. Parked inside, parked on a charger, even a very slow one, negates those effects. So, yeah, I will see you from 8 hours and 26 minutes and 495 miles of transit time to Denver, Colorado. What's happened since we've last spoken? Not much. Several phone calls, podcasts. The Porsche app led me where I needed to go. I'm getting very comfortable. The chargers are working. Not much to say. But I was thinking, the fact that we have to devote so much time to talking about charging, it would be like if we devoted that much time to gas cars, talking about fueling them. I know charging is important, just like fueling a gas car is important, and there's a lot more to charging a car than there is to fueling a gas car. But still, it would be great if we got to the point where we didn't have to talk about charging all the time anymore. And I think to get there, it would require about 4 times more fast chargers than we have right now, which percentage-wise is a lot, but raw numbers-wise is not a lot. And I think that's about 10% of the gas stations we have. So 9 to 1 gas stations to EV chargers, that would be enough to make this a no-brainer. As I wait for the charge here in Sterling, Colorado, I got to thinking. It occurred to me that the range of the car is actually not that important because the meat of the range is where the charging software wants to send me is about as long as I care to be in the car. It ends up being about 90 minutes each leg. And that, while I could and have done much longer seat time than that in the car, I feel like my back doctor would be very happy with me. And so from a physiological perspective, I think this whole deal is just about right. I'm walking, I'm stretching, I'm getting out of the car as often as my doctor said to. This is good for 43-year-old Matt. I arrived uneventfully in Denver and collected Hannah, but the chargers at our planned overnight stop were taken. So again, the day starts at EA, then west into the mountains. We didn't make it very far. Traffic. I drove for three days. No traffic. I pick up my wife. She starts driving. Traffic. My fault? Definitely your fault. What's worse, being 560 miles from where you need to go and being stuck in horrible, basically almost parked traffic, or being like three miles from where you have to go and being in parked traffic? 560. I guess. Because we don't know what lies ahead of us. Yeah. So it's Friday morning, going to the mountains from Denver. So obviously a lot of people are going skiing for the weekend. 70s, only two lanes. This super sucks, though. Pretty, though. It's gorgeous, but we have like, you know, it's a 600-mile day. It's like five charge stops or four charge stops. Even without this, it was going to be long. But it's Hannah's first time driving the car. Hannah, what do you think about our new car? Well, it's very good at going six miles an hour. Exceptional. That is for sure. Yeah. It feels great. The seat goes up high enough, which is delightful. This could be a little longer for when I need some luggage. Yeah, you know what? I noticed that the other day. It doesn't have an extendo thing on the end of it. But I want one that comes down, not across. Oh, it goes down? Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah. But, you know, otherwise. Somebody with a 3D printer, make us like a clip-on bit for that. Make a little clip-on. Yeah. That's like the ones for the windows in the back. Oh, yeah, look. The side road is going the same speed we are, but only one way. All those people thought they were getting away with something. That's why Waze didn't want us to do that. Okay, well, this morning we had a bit of a charging fail. For some reason, Porsche's route planner took us to a level two charger rather than a fast charger. The lesson is to always reality check your first stop of the day leaving a city. Especially if you want somewhere with breakfast around it. That bagel place was worth stopping at. So many vibes. There was, yes, the dude vibes and Grateful Dead vibes. Oh, baby, this lane is going to merge back in. You need to be left lane. So, eventually, we'll be moving, and then we'll show you pretty scenery. But right now, we're just sitting here. I see one car smooshed. Yeah, one in the ditch. And I see a lot of other cars. I'm not going to look. You don't look. You drive. But here's a crossover in the ditch. Airbag deployed. Ripped off. Oh, and we have one on the side with presumably some people trapped in there. Oh, they rolled over the thing. Oh, yikes. That person was coming downhill and rolled over. Okay, well, now we're moving. Now we move after 50 minutes of traffic. Ugh. Let's see some mountains. As promised, I-70 across the Rockies in winter never disappoints with tag-teaming vistas of white as we cross Loveland Pass to the green pines of the valleys along the Colorado River, the blue of the sky, and warm smoke from chimneys dotting the base of each mountain. Eventually snow turns to rocky cliffs and eventually to desert. On the twisting, descending two-lane, the Taycan reminds me it's a Porsche after all. Some of the culture at the charge stops was starting to get real interesting. Should we go to the chowhound? What I have to say about Green River is that so far it has the highest charge speed we've seen. Oh, very true. Also a lot of motels. A lot of motels, not a lot of humans. Sleepy Hollow Motel, which to its credit looks quite clean. It's just empty. And then we have the soft, green glow of the Electrify America station and a very dirty Porsche Taycan. As I now had Hannah to help with the driving, I took the time to play with things, including finding a great use case for that silly co-driver screen. Pretty sick. You can have CarPlay on one side and the range on the other side. In fact, you can run Apple Maps on one screen and Native Nav with route planning on the other screen, simultaneous. That is... A lot of input. It's a lot of input, but like, but if you need them to do different things though... Yeah, because this one has route planning built in and this one has like other stuff you might want, like businesses and stuff. You just use this for your charging and this for everything else. That's pretty sick. There is such a thing as too much screen, but the ability to multitask GPSes at least makes great use of the real estate. Being able to keep the route planner screen up in the background all the time really reduces the potential multitasking stress of a solo EV road trip. As the sun set over the high desert to close out my fourth straight day of radar cruise control, drive, charge, repeat, Hannah and I bathed in a fishbowl of color before parking in St. George for the night. Good morning, everyone. 5.58 a.m. Mesquite, Nevada. Every single day this trip has had to begin with a charge in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the drive. My trip would go differently if I could charge overnight at every single stop guaranteed, but actually that has been the biggest headache here and not finding fast charging, which the car has been pretty adept at. It only led me astray one time out of maybe 25 charges, which is pretty cool. And then last night, the hotel was listed as having chargers, had three chargers. The three chargers were available. They were all for Teslas, and I didn't have the destination charger adapter, which I have since ordered. So we're refining the formula. By the time we do this again, I guess we should have it sorted. But if I'm a hotel, I need to be investing in some level two chargers because I'm filtering for that when I search for hotels from now on. And another thing, can we talk about food for a second? Look, I understand that we have upgraded from chargers that are, like, literally in the middle of, like, nowhere to ones that are in Walmarts and travel stops, and that's good. That's an improvement. But I really like what Rivian has done out in Joshua Tree. Go check that out, some of what they do. It's kind of corny, but I get it with this one because, like, I'm not looking for an Erewhon, but I'd really like some of these things put in places with healthy food. I feel like crap. I'm in the car for five days, not really exercising because I'm driving so much. I'm just eating whatever is here at these stops. It's not great. The green glow of Electrify America with the gray and blue backdrop of a Walmart and a Nevada sunrise. We pressed on uneventfully past Vegas and towards the coast. I like to stop in Baker at the world's tallest thermometer, but mainly for the gyro across the street. First total charge fail, and it's the last time we have to charge before getting back to L.A. We went all the way, yeah, we've gone all the way across the country, basically. And finally, Porsche's charging software, or Porsche's route planning software, sent us to a charger where all the chargers were down. EVgo, world's tallest thermometer. That charger has let me down several times. Go straight to the stop sign. So, fortunately, we're in Baker, and there's Electrify America's over there, so we're going to go try and use those. Finish this drive off. Almost home. But Hannah's now done four shifts, and I had multiple requests on Instagram. Hannah's review of the Taycan Cross 3s. Mo, please. Okay. So, for starts, four long shifts driving. I've yet to have the telltale butt cramp that usually comes from such a long stretch, which is nice. So, seats, very good. Seat goes up even higher than I needed it, which was one of my concerns, for sure. Air vents, not a fan of having to use the screen. It just needs some air flowing, and now there's too many buttons. Touchscreen controls on vents are no good. We're not talking about the thing. We're talking about the thing that actually controls the direction of the vent. Yes. That was settled science, and it did not need reinventing. Yes. Okay. The brake pedal, very uncomfortable for me. You'll get used to it. I know, but will you get used to me, like, gently braking and then slamming on the brake, because I don't understand how the car is stopping. I think maybe leaving a little more distance between yourself and the car in front might be a workaround for that problem. Handy tip. What Hannah is describing is, I've talked about it a lot, is the transition between when you hit the, you know, Porsches don't have one-pedal drive. They coast, right? They freewheel. So, when you first press the brake, it doesn't activate the calipers. It activates the regen, the same way a one-pedal drive system would. And then you press it more, and it grabs the calipers. And so there's a sort of slight transitional jerkiness, and you have to reprogram how you hit the brakes. But it's okay. She'll learn. I'm very used to the power brakes. Yeah. Or the Bentley, where I just have to stand on them. The Bentley has hydraulic brakes. Those are, that's a totally different thing. Those are weird, too. We've had, you've had a series of cars with interesting brakes. That's me. I love an interesting brake. These are good brakes. They've been saying that about me for ages. Okay, so, but anyway, daily driver status approved? Absolutely approved. Yes. Excellent. But, some concerns. What are the concerns? Well, not concerns, but a few hiccups. Oh, yeah, okay. So, there's been a, as far as hiccups on the road, there have been just a couple little hiccups. One, I got a warning light saying that our high beams were not functioning properly. The high beams were functioning properly. The warning light went away and never came back. So, there's one. We had one charge error where the charger said it couldn't connect to the vehicle. I unplugged the charger, turned the car on, plugged it back in, and then it worked. Done. We had, oh, and the rear view camera, for some reason, is, like, foggy. Like, it's dirty. It looks like it's dirty, but I'm cleaning it and it doesn't get clean. So, I'm wondering if there's some, like, grime or something, like, inside of it. I don't know, but bumper-to-bumper warranty is going to solve that problem. Other than that, this car is pretty spectacular. So, we'll see you back in California. I don't know why we keep doing this every single time we take an electric car anywhere outside the city. It's always like, well, we can make it home. You know, we have the three miles cushion to play with to make it home. And so, here we are, coming back from Vegas. Now that we're in the city or county limits of L.A., 68 miles to home, 73 miles on the battery. Now, the good news is that Porsche's battery, their math is accurate. So, and five miles, like, that's, in L.A., five miles is a lot. That's, like, halfway across the city. But still. It could be four hours. Yeah, and single digits is still stressful. So, we may end this video on a stressful note yet. Spoiler alert, we made it home with 15 miles of range to spare. And while, yes, driving an EV across the country is still not as convenient as a gas car, the fact is we made it with zero planning and zero familiarity with the vehicle at the start. And now that the Taycan lives here in Southern California, it will charge luxuriously, leisurely at home. And we won't have to talk about this again for a while. Lots of lessons were learned on this trip. But most importantly, we learned how much we look forward to living with this car for the next couple of years. Using it, filming with it, maybe customizing it a bit, and hopefully my bet on finding value where others may have missed it will pay off. 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