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We’re in that weird but extremely exciting era of EVs right now, where first-generation limitations are comfortably in the rearview and technology is advancing rapidly, but kinks still need smoothing.
The Porsche Cayenne Electric I drove last week is a perfect example. It’s officially EPA-rated for a max range around 330 miles, but can easily return 350 miles or more, which is excellent. When you plug it in, though, you have to pay attention—or, rather, make sure the valet attendant plugging it in for you is. If they aren’t, you might return to the car with a battery no more juiced up than when you left.
See, the Cayenne Electric has an 800-volt charging architecture, which allows for very snappy recharging on a Level 3 DC system. (Try 10% to 80% in around 15 minutes.) It also has two ports: the driver-side port is a Tesla-style NACS hookup, but it can only be used for DC charging. The passenger side has a J1772 port, which you use for slower Level 2 AC chargers you might have at home or work, or find at a parking garage, hotel, shopping center, etc.
In some colors, from some angles, the Cayenne Electric looks alright. Porsche
To put it more precisely, you can’t use one port for the other’s purpose. To be clear, the Cayenne Electric isn’t the only EV like this; Mercedes’ new CLA has the same problem. This isn’t a newsflash, and I reckon that if you live with one of these cars, you accept this usability quirk and accommodate for it, ideally with a bag full of adapters.
The problem is that the rest of the world might not. I had valet at a hotel I was staying at park my loaner Cayenne so they could top up the battery, and I specifically mentioned that the Tesla port wouldn’t work for their purposes—they needed to use the port on the other side. I wasn’t surprised when I returned to the vehicle a day later and found the state of charge unchanged.
To be clear, I wasn’t and am not angry at the valet, whose job is busy enough as it is. Hell, I’m not even frustrated with Porsche for designing the vehicle this way. Again, we’re in the most transformational period our industry has seen practically since its inception. Porsche managed to fit a NACS port into the Cayenne Electric at the eleventh hour of the model’s development when it became clear that that’s where things were headed, at least on this side of the Atlantic. The presence of that port makes for the easiest and quickest charging experience possible in this market.
But the state of the industry, the actors that define its course, and the speed of technological progress itself create these, shall we say, episodes of friction. They’re not dealbreakers, and they’re certainly not worth shunning the future, but they do lead to growing pains, and they’re worth being mindful of.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
