Porsche Macan Turbo - long-term-review

Were this a combustion-engined car, it would be fuelled by the time you’ve read this. Not so with electricity…

Take our first long-distance trip away from the security of home charging: Center Parcs for a Bank Holiday weekend. I reserved an EV charging bay, which is easy and gets you parking nearer the lodges, then did all the usual QR scanning and payment-detail entering and felt smug. But the chargers only juice overnight (with a three-night minimum stay, there’s no rush), so you leave your vehicle before the electrons are going and hope it works. Which it didn’t. On neither the first nor second nights. At which point I gave up.

Still, with 800V architecture the Macan can charge up to 270kW, so I used the Porsche app, and found a set of Gridserve chargers at Chieveley services promising 460kW(!) potential on the return journey. The Porsche app even promised a few were available as we approached…

But they weren’t, and on this Bank Holiday Monday there were even Gridserve employees helping form an orderly queue. After 20 minutes it was our turn, but 460kW was pure fantasy; 350kW was the actual rating, and only when working in tandem on a quiet day. We got a 175kW charger... that struggled to 45kW, so the five-minute ‘splash and dash’ optimistically promised by the Porsche app became a 40-minute drag. Still, we discovered the Macan has YouTube and watched Bluey.

Talking to Gridserve, at places like Chieveley they’re hampered by an older grid connection, while the spurious 460kW is down to a third party that takes info from them and sends it to Porsche and others.

Lesson learned, because recent trips have been more successful as I’ve stuck to purpose-built Ionity hubs and Porsche Centres. Granted, a trip to Liverpool started poorly as the Porsche app reckoned I could arrive at Ionity Stafford with 3 per cent charge spare, plug in for five minutes, and then arrive at my destination with 0 per cent, despite the preset minimums set at 10 per cent.

So I stopped at Ionity Birmingham with 19 per cent remaining, and hit a peak charging speed of 246kW on the way to it smashing 60kWh into the Macan in 22 minutes. That’s pretty darn good, even if the average to reach 80 per cent was ultimately 164kW. If only the Starbucks across the car park had been open: “Go round to the Drive Thru,” pointed the helpful lady re-stocking shelves. “In what?” I mouthed back. “My car’s tethered over there.”

Porsche Chester was also a decent experience the next day, hitting 247kW, though in a bid to give myself a full battery for the evening drive home, a 20-minute-ish charge to 80 per cent became nearly 50 minutes before I got bored at 96 per cent and left. Back in Brum that evening it took 26 minutes to add 32kWh and go up to 91 per cent – and I was early enough in the night to get inside Starbucks.

Was it better than filling with fuel? No. Was it worse? Jesus, Hell and Christ yes when the kids were there, despite the Heeler family’s best efforts. But for the other journeys, actually no. Rather than powering through five-hour journeys I had proper stops, doom-scrolled or checked emails for a bit, then continued. And when I popped out from my parents to Porsche Chester, my dad came along and we went for a balmy evening walk.

So, a few tweaks to your routine and all can be fine – though a family holiday to Cornwall will cast the deciding vote in due course. Meantime, home charging FTW! Especially when it’s a tenth of the cost of public ultra-fast charging.