Recalls, Upgrades, and Killing Range for Looks! - 6 Month Half Price Taycan Update! _ TheSmokingTire

What's up everybody, Matt Farah here and welcome to Westside Collector Car Storage. Six months ago, a lot of you folks were really excited about the half-price used Taycan Cross Turismo that I bought in Michigan and drove home sight unseen to California. Well, we've gone through it, we've been driving it, we've shown it, we've modified it, and many interesting things have happened for us to learn and share with you. In this video, we're going to get through as much of that stuff as possible, so let's get to it after a word from this video's sponsor, Thrive Market. Guys, I got to thank Thrive Market for sponsoring today's video. They are redefining the shopping experience as we know it. Thrive Market is my new go-to destination for healthy and sustainable groceries, offering a stress-free and more affordable shopping experience for the things that I use regularly in my kitchen. You see, I cook five nights a week, and I shop like a European. I go to the store every day and get fresh ingredients to make dinner that night. I like fresh, and I also don't like to think ahead too much, and I don't plan to change that. But what about everything else? What about the stuff I keep in my kitchen all the time, the expensive stuff, the stuff I always forget when I'm buying dinner supplies, the stuff that can be hard to find unless you go to specialty stores? Thrive Market's got it. No matter your diet or your restriction, Thrive Market has affordable, healthy groceries that come straight to your door, including low-sugar, low-carb, gluten-free, vegan, etc. I ordered olive oil, nuts, nut butters, and healthy snacks for in-between meals or after workouts. I love Thrive because it has all the chef-friendly brands that I love, the healthy snacks I want in my house, and with AutoShip, I never forget to get the kitchen staples I need to make dinner on the fly. Hit the link in the video description box or go to thrivemarket.com slash thesmokingtire to receive 30% off your first order and a free gift when you join Thrive Market today. And thank you to Thrive for sponsoring today's video. Let's start with the big items. I have driven this car just over 5,000 miles since I bought it on New Year's Eve. Now, that does include the 2,300-mile road trip home from Michigan, so I can probably expect about 5,000 miles per year driving around LA. Now, that doesn't sound like much, but in this city, drive times are often quite long while distances are very short on account of our traffic, which averages only 19 miles an hour within the city, which is why an EV is good in the first place. I charge the car to 80% about once a week under normal use, and that gets me around 175 miles of usable driving. If I charge fully and drive reasonably, I get 215 to 220 miles of range, which, honestly, not that great. But as I talked about in earlier videos, it wouldn't really change how I operate my day-to-day life, which is just plugging in at home overnight once in a while, or the way I road trip, which is stopping every 150 to 160 miles for human functions. Forget car functions. Although I have a full CPO warranty, so I shouldn't have to spend any money on repairs, the car has had no reliability issues in the six months when I owned it. And that doesn't mean it's been absolutely flawless, but when I say reliability, what I really mean is, has it, like, broken? Can it not go into gear? Will it not turn on or off? Can it be driven or not? And powertrain, driving-wise, everything, ace. Now, just because the car has been reliable doesn't mean it's been 100% perfect. The PCM, the software and the UI, it's a little clunkier than even Porsche's second generation system, which they now have in the current cars, and a little clunkier than the old Mach-E system that we had. Doesn't overshadow the dynamics or the things I really like about the car, and 90% of the time I'm using CarPlay, which works as it should. But there have been some software hiccups, such as the serious station listings getting reset, uh, favorited stations memory getting wiped randomly and seemingly for no reason, duplicates of radio stations in the favorites list, things like that. Then there's the ADAS. Even though I've turned it all off except for automatic emergency braking and rear cross-traffic alert, everything else is off. Nothing related to the steering. Once in a while on the highway, I will get a message saying, take over steering with a tension in the wheel and a flashing red warning. I'm already steering. Okay, so I took it to the and they couldn't reproduce that issue. So unfortunately, it happens once in a while on the highway, and I kind of just have to live with it. And that's weird, um, but okay. And then when they did that software update, uh, I got a few good updates in the PCM, but in my last video, I talked about how awesome it was that I could run Waze here and the Porsche route planning software in my passenger display simultaneously. Well, the Germans had giveth and the Germans took it away because now if you try and activate Waze with that running, it deactivates it. So apparently I told everybody about some kind of a loophole in my last video and the Germans went, oh wait, we better take that away from people. And I, I outed us all and now we've all lost the feature. So I think I have to formally apologize to all, uh, pre-2024 Taycan owners that have now lost this amazing feature that maybe I just told them they had in the first place. Other than that, they did replace one very crucial piece of hardware, which I will show you up front. After I tell you about the service I had to do, uh, there was a service that I had to do once I got to Los Angeles that was not included in either my purchase price, my CPO program or anything, and it costs money. And it was a brake fluid flush and replacement and inspection of my pads and a replacement of my cabin air filter, which I realized after the fires was probably a good idea anyway. And that cost just about $750. Now it has been to the dealer two times. The first time was to do address some recalls. The biggest of which was this. I got a brand new charge cable, which was actually convenient because I never even used the old one. Don't know if I'll ever use this one, but here it is. And it was free. The second one was for the software update that I just talked about. Plus the driver's side window was making a little bit of noise when it was doing its auto opening and closing with the door. They replaced the weather stripping under warranty. Now it's quiet, good to go, but there is some other weird thing happening, which I can show you at the back. Now, power tailgate, right? Plenty of space. The Cross Turismo has a lot more trunk space than the sedan and the hatch is great. Love it all, right? You got your two buttons here, one to close the hatch and one to close the hatch and lock the car. More often than not, if you close the hatch and lock the car, the hatch does not close all the way. Let's see if it'll do it for you fine people. Chico doesn't want to perform. Doesn't want to perform. Well, yeah. Well, today it wants to work. It wants to embarrass me on camera is what happens, but sometimes it doesn't close all the way and you have to do it again. Maybe we can fix that one. It seems to be happy today. Interlude, it's been four hours and it didn't. See? It didn't go all the way down. I wasn't lying. Okay, now I modified the car, which you can obviously see, so let's talk about it down here. Here we can see most of what we've modified in the car. Being an EV, you're not going to modify the powertrain and being an everyday car with factory air suspension, I'm not going to modify that either. HRE made us a set of 522 21-inch wheels, which is a two-piece wheel that has a forged outer barrel, not a rolled outer barrel. That's a very, very cool thing. So these are really strong and really well made. And so we've got those in 21-inch with a Michelin Pilot Sport EV tire. And I use the Treadwell tool on Discount Tire's website to find the tires for the Taycan, which are ultimately a Michelin Pilot Sport EV. And as I wanted an OEM tire, but with a new fitment than I had before, because I went from a 20 to a 21 and Treadwell made that process easier. It's a tool that makes the tire buying experience for the customer more authentic because it's based on real world test results and fitments, fuel economy, et cetera, paired with actual objective and subjective test driver data. So we've got our wheel and tire package, which is the same size as you would get if you had gotten a Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo, which is great. I then had R Strada order me the Turbo Fender flares in primer and paint them body color. So even if you got a Taycan Turbo, these would be black no matter what color the car is. So painting them to match body color does really change the look. And I got my clear corner marker, which blinks orange, but not having that bit of orange there during the day, I think is a good look. And then lastly, I got my license plate wrap front plate sticker, which is actually legal in California. That's part of a pilot program. It's the same size, shape, color, font, and reflectivity as a real plate, but you don't have to drill your bumper. They didn't pay me to say that. I just happened to like it. But that is the extent of our modifications to the Taycan. It seems to be going well though, because it was the only Taycan at Air Water back in April. Battery is liquid cooled, as well as was on the poster of the Avance Magazine Wagon Fest this past weekend. So it went from the used car lot in Detroit to posters and features in just six months. I'd say we're doing well. But the modifications have actually changed not only how the car drives a little bit, but also the range. And let's hop in and talk about that on the road. Well, first off, if you didn't know it from me talking about it in the podcast or that kind of stuff, I really like this car. I love driving it around the city. I like cruising in it on the highway. I like looking at it. I like sitting in it. The driving position is fabulous. Being the Cross Turismo 4, this is in fact the softest Taycan, which frankly I'm okay with. It's for urban and highway driving, not carving canyons. They offer canyon carving ones. They say, you know, turbo and GTS on the back. So this one is pretty soft to begin with. So what I want to talk about in this part of this video is how changing the wheel and tire package affects this electric car. It affects it in two ways. One is ride and handling. Two is range. Okay. So the HRE 522 two-piece forged wheel is, oh, frozen berry metallic Taycan. Yes. On rims. So the HRE 522 two-piece forged wheel is an inch bigger and slightly wider than the cast wheels that came on my car. There are four pounds a corner at the front and five pounds a corner at the back, lighter than the car's stock wheels, which is very cool. So despite the fact that they are bigger, they're lighter. So that means they take less energy to get going and they take less energy to stop. So in the city, having lighter wheels is more energy efficient. However, they're an inch bigger. And I'd be lying if I said the ride wasn't slightly negatively affected. The big bumps are just fine. Those are pretty much the same, but the hard edges of the curbs and cracks in the concrete, those are a little bit worse. Now, Hannah hasn't said anything about it. So I take it that it is not bad enough that she even really notices, but I do notice a little bit. The other aspect is because the tires are a little wider, especially at the front, the steering is a little bit heavier. Again, not bad, but just something I notice. In fact, I would say it was a little more pleasant before when it was a little lighter. Also, the tires are stickier. I imagine the car will handle better at the limit. The tire is nice and quiet, but being stickier and being wider, the range is negatively affected. I found on the highway a loss of about 5% of my total range, which doesn't bother me so much because I'm not pushing the range anymore very often. In the city, I believe the lightness of the wheels offsets that problem, and I have not found my urban range to be negatively affected. I only have one month or about four charges worth of driving, so maybe not a big enough sample size to call it science, but it hasn't negatively impacted me in any way. And frankly, it looks awesome. There's a price to be paid for looking awesome, and to a certain extent, I am more than willing to pay this price. This car looks awesome. I mean, it looked good before, but it had a lot of that Subaru outbackness, and now I'm getting stopped on the street. Now it's featured in shows. I didn't have to change that much. Paint a little of this, new wheels, you know, just a couple little things here and there, and we are, you know, we're in the game and looking good. I actually, it's funny, when you take this car and you put it in sport suspension, it actually rides really nice. It's not too stiff. It's one of the only cars that's not too stiff, and in fact, I enjoy driving this car in sport mode. It's sort of like what you might have from a GTS or a turbo in regular mode. I use so little of the brake caliper. I'm in the regen brake so much, and the brake caliper so little that the pads have like this like sort of surface coating on them, because they're just not being used at all. It is pretty, pretty cool. So many people have told me that I need to put the, either the drop links or the further lowering module. Now these Instagram keyboard warriors may be on to something from a purely aesthetic point of view, but in terms of actually driving around the city, nah. This car, I raise it, I put it on the regular normal suspension height to drive around, and it probably doesn't look very good at that height, but I'm inside it, so I don't care. I can't see it, and then I go to low when I want to park it, and then there's still, yeah, a little bit of a gap. It doesn't like slam, you know. It's not show car, but we're talking about a regular car. There's only so much sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I tried a car with the lowering links. I didn't like that really at all, and that module, the electronic lowering module, is expensive. It's like $2,000. I'm not into that either. All is well for the time being. The car is pretty. The car drives well. It makes me happy, and for the next three and a half years, I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, which is driving it. A couple of final thoughts. One, you'll notice I've stopped talking about wrapping the car, and furthermore, I've painted some bits white. We're sticking with the white. I actually kind of dig it once you get the wheels and polish it all off in the right way, and it does have that limestone gray light interior. My recommendation, if you're going for the light interior with this or any other brand, be prepared for a thorough deep leather cleaning every six months because my clothes turn that seat different colors. Speaking of six months, that's when I'll see you next when we'll check in with my half-price used Taycan again on the smoking tire. 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