Radar 5.0 Release

Summary

Radar 5.0 is the phone release. The app has been rebuilt around the screen most people actually use it on, with tabs along the bottom, a results sheet you pull up over the map, and every control large enough to hit with a thumb. Alongside that: London's ULEZ, LEZ and Congestion Charge and the Bath and Bristol Clean Air Zones on the map, what3words addresses in the search box, and seven more countries with the full local map.

Rebuilt for the phone

The hamburger menu is gone. On a phone or a tablet, four tabs now sit across the bottom of the screen, where your thumb already is: Map, Saved, Add and More. They are always there, whatever you are doing, and every page in Radar is now two taps away at most.

That fixes some things that were plainly wrong. Settings took several taps to reach through a drawer, the Data sources page could not be reached from anywhere at all, and if you had not saved anything yet there was no way to open your saved places on a phone.

Your results now live in a sheet that slides up over the map, with three heights: a single-row peek, a half-and-half working position, and nearly full screen for reading down a long list. Tapping the handle moves between them, so you never have to drag if dragging is awkward for you. The map stays live underneath the whole time, and it knows where the sheet is: the zoom buttons, the round buttons at the bottom right and the map credits all move with it, so nothing important ends up hidden.

Everything that narrows a search now sits behind one Filters button, and it runs your changes once, when you press Apply. Ticking six categories used to start six separate searches, each taking a few seconds, so the app felt as though it was fighting you. Now you set everything up, press Apply, and wait once. The categories list has a search box too, so you can find one by name instead of scrolling past forty of them.

The radius is a row of buttons rather than a slider. Dragging a thin slider to land on one of eleven set distances is fiddly at the best of times and worse in a moving vehicle. Tap the distance you want. The distances themselves are unchanged.

Smaller things you may notice:

• Everything is bigger, sized for a thumb rather than a mouse pointer.
• The map controls work in the dark. The zoom buttons and map credits used to stay light whatever look you were in, glaring out of a dark map. They follow your light or dark setting now.
• The search box no longer shouts. It used to force everything into capitals, which suited a postcode and looked wrong for a place name.
• Reordering is by button, not by dragging, which never worked on a touch screen at all.
• Radar respects "reduce motion", and the map fits round the notch on phones with a rounded screen or a home bar.

Tablets held in portrait get the phone layout, which is what they should have had all along. At around 800 pixels wide Radar used to show the full desktop layout squeezed into a phone-shaped window, with card grids too narrow to read.

On a computer the way you work is unchanged: results in a sidebar beside the map, search and filters and your account in the header.

Two new search buttons

Search where I am takes a single position reading, searches around it, and stops. It does not leave your position switched on afterwards, so it costs you nothing in battery. On a phone it is the round radar button at the bottom right; on a computer it is next to the search box.

Search this area appears when you have dragged the map a fair way from your last search, as a pill across the top of the map, offering to run the same search where you are now looking. It is for exploring ahead along tomorrow's route without retyping anything.

Searching by what3words

Radar now understands what3words addresses, so you can search for ///filled.count.soap the same way you would search for a postcode, with or without the leading slashes.

It matters for the places a postcode cannot describe. A what3words address names a three metre square anywhere in the world, so it will take you to the exact entrance to a farm track, a particular pitch in a field, or the layby somebody told you about, where a postcode would only get you to the middle of the village. It is the format people share when there is no address to give, and it is what mountain rescue and the emergency services ask for.

Radar shows the nearest named place alongside it, so you can check the square is roughly where you expected before the map moves. It is free, it works worldwide, and there is no separate what3words account to set up.

Emission and charging zones in the UK

The zone layer used to cover France alone. It now covers London and Bath and Bristol as well.

If you drive a motorhome, this is the part to read. Nearly every online checker reports London's ULEZ at £12.50 a day and stops there. A motorhome over 3.5 tonnes is outside the ULEZ and inside the Low Emission Zone, where the charge is £100 or £300 a day, and a diesel one between 1.205 tonnes unladen and 3.5 tonnes is inside both, with a different standard to meet for each. The two zones share an outline exactly, so Radar draws them as one shape and lists every zone that applies in a single popup. The LEZ answer cannot hide underneath the ULEZ one.

The Congestion Charge is drawn separately, in amber rather than purple, because it is a different kind of rule: it is central London only, £18 a day, and it has nothing to do with emissions. A brand new electric van pays it in full.

Bath and Bristol work differently from London and from each other. What you pay is decided by what your V5C says your vehicle is, not by how big it looks. Bath is a class C zone and never charges cars whatever they emit; Bristol is a class D zone and does. So the same motorhome is free in Bath and £9 a day in Bristol if it is registered as a car, and £9 in both if it is a van conversion. Over 3.5 tonnes it is £100 a day in both, though Bath drops a privately owned heavy goods vehicle to £9 if you register it with the council.

Only the boundaries are published as open data. Nobody publishes the charges or the emissions standards in a form software can read, so a person checks them and each zone shows the date that was last done. The Congestion Charge went from £15 to £18 on 2 January 2026, which is exactly the kind of change that date is there to catch.

The five other English Clean Air Zones, Scotland's low emission zones and Oxford's zero emission zone are not on the map yet. There is no single national feed for them, so each one is its own piece of work, and an area with no zone drawn on it is not a guarantee there is no scheme there.

Seven more countries

Radar holds a full local copy of the map for fifteen areas now, up from eight. The new ones are Switzerland, Austria, Andorra, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, which takes in Svalbard and Jan Mayen as well.

That is western Europe covered end to end, the Alpine passes, and the road north through Denmark into Scandinavia, rather than a patch here and there. A search in any of them comes back as quickly, and in as much detail, as a search at home.

A country's map is copied over for the first time on its own schedule, so if a search somewhere very new comes back thinner than you expected, that is usually what you are seeing rather than an empty country.

Belgian food hygiene

Belgian food businesses now show whether they hold the AFSCA/FAVV Smiley, the certificate you see in the window for a checked hygiene system.

It is not the same kind of answer as the UK's food-hygiene ratings, and the docs say so plainly: Belgium publishes no graded scores at all, only the list of businesses that hold the certificate. So a Smiley is a good sign, and its absence tells you nothing either way.

The Data sources page

Each country on the Data sources page is now a section you can open and close, with the number of sources on it, so the page opens as a short list of countries rather than a wall of cards. Worldwide is open to start with, since it applies wherever you are.

Every country Radar holds the map for now gets a section, including the ones with no source of their own. They used to be missing from the page altogether, which read as "Radar has nothing here" when the truth was the opposite: the local map is loaded and stored, and every worldwide source works there.

On a phone, the page is under the More tab, which is the first time it has been reachable from a phone at all.

Still to come

Route planning still covers Great Britain only, on both plans. Places in Germany or Norway do not mean directions there.

Offline map packs remain a planned Premium feature and will arrive with the native mobile app. They are not available yet on any platform.