To those who earned their car by getting the details right, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect Porsche to do the same.

 

If you don't want to hear the radio at start up...select the USB or AUX as the source. When car starts and so long as USB or AUX is not hooked up, you will hear nothing but the sweet sound of a 911 engine

 

Hoping you're not insinuating I didn't earn my car there Noah...

 

No, just insinuating that some manufacturers care more about getting the details right than others.

Failure to restore the radio and/or HVAC settings that were in effect when the car was turned off is a bug. There is no other way to spin it. The fact that the bug has not been fixed suggests only one thing, IMHO: that somebody at Porsche doesn't care enough to fix it.

And that "bugs" me.

 

Thanks for all the comments! I'm on my way back home and will try some of the suggestions to see if there is a fix or not. As for the "little black book" does anyone know if they have a "cliff note" version? ;-)

Happy Holidays to everyone!!

 

I bought my 991s in March of this year and immediately noticed that the climate control system (A/C or heat) automatically comes on everytime I started the car. I spent several hours looking through the owners manual and reading about the various key settings, etc. to figure out how to stop this from happening. Finally I gave up and took the car to dealer. Spent about an hour with the tech and he could not figure it out either.

So, the tech emailed the engineers in Germany to get an answer. The explanation directly from Germany was that all 991's have the climate control system come on at start up regardless of key settings/seat setting, and regardless of whether the climate control system was "off" when the car was previously shut off. They said this was by design and that there is no way to change it.

I realize it is only one switch down to turn this off, but I think it's incredibly annoying to have to do this everytime I get in the car. This is a bug, not a design feature. Porsche needs to fix this issue through a software update. At start up, the car should default to the setting when the car was last turned off, i.e. if climate system was off when car was last turned off, then it stays off at next start up.

If anyone hears of a fix to this, please post. Thanks!

 

If you have a keyless system you only need to turn off the ac, push the key set button on the drivers door and the #3 button on the door. You will hear a tone and presto the next time you start the car the ac will be off

The car will also memorize the drivers seat settings, the door mirror settings, the temperature and the fan settings.

 

I have the keyless system and your solution does not solve the problem. While you may be correct that I can have the "A/C off" button pressed (and that may prevent the A/C from coming on next time I start the car), it still does not prevent the automatic climate control system from engaging the next time the car is started.

At start up, the climate control system automatically displays the previous set temperature and the only way to shut it off is to push one click down on the fan control button to turn it off.

 

I misunderstood your question. Sorry.

 

It's a shame this bothers you. I read through the thread to see if anyone else had explained that it happens that way by design. Apparently they did and it still bothers you.

It is not a bug. It does that on purpose.

Gary, who feels right at home when people curse at design engineers

 

It'd be fun to speculate as to what that purpose might be, wouldn't it?

Seems fairly obvious that things like this happen when CAN bus hosts from completely different vendors don't talk to each other. "I thought it was your job to store the last HVAC setting." "Wait, no, that was supposed to be your job!" "I know, let's blame the seat ventilation controller. He's hibernating, and can't defend himself."

Ask Boeing how the 787 is going, and you'll understand what life is like for the accessory engineers at Porsche these days. They're almost as helpless as their customers when something doesn't quite work right.

 

This and the radio turning on (regardless of the work arounds) are pretty darn odd. I don't see any point in those two things automatically turning on, nor do I think it would be terribly difficult to have changed that during the initial programming / preliminary testing. Was it like this on the 997 as well? Just curious.

 

I agree about the radio. Just weird.

 

Sorry, I may be getting in at the middle of this conversation, but it doesn't automatically turn on if you have turned it off before shutting the engine down does it?

ChuckJ

 

I never cared enough to look for hacks, but it always seemed unavoidable with my 997 as well.

That last post was rudely abrupt and not meant that way. Damn cold here, as in both: unexpected weather and an annoying infection of the sneeze/cough/choke sort. As Noah says, it is worth speculating.

Partially, I do blame the poor integration of subsystems. It is very likely, approaching certainty from the product results, that the engineering culture at Porsche is focused on The Car and All Its Subsystems and Not That Noisome Infotainment Crap. I joke that they assigned an intern from the local high school to run down to the five-and-dime when Marketing insisted the Americans wanted a nav system. That's not fair. I'm sure he was from the junior college.

It took decades to convince European engineers that American sales required a real air-conditioning system and that a lady's genteel fan did not qualify. When you grow up in Frankfurt your idea of a hot day does not encompass Phoenix in August, still less Houston. The silly excuse for a center-stack on Porsches is caused by the same sort of culture gap I believe.

We actually do have roads that someone used for a decade around the Gold Rush that haven't seen a vehicle since a twenty-mule team got lost. In Europe, if it was a road, it still is. I see that, what with their space constraints and all. But if I get one more direction to "turn right now" because a sat image convinced a European we have a boulevard where I see nothing but sagebrush I may mail an evidentiary photo along with the hard drive to Zuffenhausen with an acid note.

That pretty much explains the recalcitrant 'radio' problem at system wake-up. Not to mention the deafening effect of the system dropping out of USB, AUX, or disk when you eject the media and the system tries frantically to find a source of audio.

The a/c subsystem has other reasons I believe. Clumsily integrated with the owner's manual in this case, but valid engineering issues they addressed in the way we've been deriding. It is necessary to operate a "climate control" system regularly. "Every time the car starts" is a good approximation of 'regularly' in this context. I'm not a mechanical engineer but I did have such working for me in systems integration, and I report their remarks from a diistance of thirty years: "Otherwise, it stinks." Later, we had people dying of Legionairre's Disease, which they remarked smugly.

Paraphrasing their caustic remarks, any system of this sort becomes a petri dish when you leave it idle. 'Stuff' grows in there. Thus, the engineering guideline that doesn't get reflected in the user's manual explanation: "Always start operations by turning on the air system to dry things out and kill the wee beasties." And I do recommend that owners not override that for a few minutes. Say, until the engine itself is warmed up. A few miles.

Besides the health/stinky issues, many climates cause window fogging that must be combated by turning on the airflow for the first bit of operation. Or so I've heard. I'm a control and communications type myself and would have expected that other solutions to this one exist, but maybe the essential requirement of health has meant the mechanical designers have no incentive. They have to turn on the system anyway, so why bother?

Those are my best guesses. Dredged from thirty-year-old memory banks but quite possibly still au courant in Zuffenhausen since this isn't really of the essence for The Car which is the spirit of Porsche engineering.

Gary, sneezing his way back to bed