Radar 5.2 Release

Summary

Radar now opens by asking what you want to do, and shows you the handful of categories that go with the answer instead of all 46 at once. Alongside that: toll gates on the map in every country we cover, severe weather warnings for Spain, Switzerland's protected areas, ferry terminals as a category of their own, and EV chargers that finally work outside Britain.

What do you want to do?

There is a pill above the map naming the job you are on. Tap it and you get seven answers, in the words a driver would actually use:

• Find a parkup for tonight
• Fill up or charge
• Empty and refill the van
• Eat or shop
• Park up for a while
• Find a mechanic
• Leisure time

Pick one and Radar ticks the categories that go with it. Empty and refill the van brings up dump stations, drinking water, toilets, showers and launderettes together, because that is one stop rather than five errands.

This replaces having everything switched on. Searching all 46 categories at once sounds generous and is not. A search in a town centre comes back full of cafes and shops, and the dump station a few miles out gets pushed off the end of the list by them. An answer is at most five categories, so the things you came for have room.

Your answer is remembered, so Radar opens on the same job next time. A first visit starts on Find a parkup for tonight.

The full category list is still there, underneath the question in Filters, and nothing stops you ticking exactly what you want. If you had Radar set up before this arrived, the change resets your categories once. Set them again in Filters and they stay that way.

Toll gates

A new layer, free, covering every country whose map data Radar holds: the M6 Toll and Britain's tolled bridges and tunnels as well as the French autoroutes and the alpine tunnels. It starts switched off, because a toll you have already decided to pay is not something you need warned about.

A dashed pin has no barrier, and that is the one to watch. A free-flow gantry has nothing to stop at: cameras read your plate as you drive under at full speed and you owe the money afterwards, usually online within a few days. Miss the signs and the first you hear of it is a fine posted to the address on your V5C. These are spreading, from the Dartford Crossing to a growing number of French autoroutes.

Radar does not quote you a price, because nobody publishes one. Every motorway company issues its own table once a year, usually as a PDF. Where a contributor has noted a price we show it word for word and say where it came from.

What it does tell you is which class you are in. France sorts vehicles by height and weight, and a motorhome is rarely in the cheapest one: over 2 m tall is class 2, roughly half again what a car pays, and over 3 m or over 3.5 tonnes is class 3 with the lorries. Most toll calculators quote the car price. With your Premium vehicle profile filled in, a toll gate's detail names your likely class, so the number you budget for is your own.

Severe weather warnings

Spain is the first country to have them, from AEMET, the national met agency: heatwaves, snow, high wind, coastal storms, fog, avalanches and the rest, each shaded over the area it applies to and colour-coded on the forecaster's own yellow, orange, red scale, so it means the same on the map as it does on the local news.

Tap one for what is expected, the advice given, and how long it runs. The text is in English, because AEMET publishes every warning in both languages and Radar reads the English one.

Other countries will follow. Most European met services publish in the same standard format, so the next one is a new feed rather than a new feature.

Protected areas

Switzerland is the first country to have them, from the federal inventories: game reserves, water and migratory bird reserves, mire landscapes, and the parks of national importance, shaded in green.

This one is about where you sleep. Switzerland has no national list of where you may park overnight, because that is decided canton by canton, twenty-six different ways. What is broadly true everywhere is that staying the night inside one of these areas is not tolerated. Treat the green shading as somewhere to move on from before you settle for the evening, and read the signs at the spot itself.

Game reserves come in two grades and Radar draws the difference: fully protected areas are solid, partly protected ones dashed and lighter. Where the authority did not state a grade, Radar says so rather than guessing.

Ferries, chargers and libraries

Ferry terminals are a category of their own, under Overland, so you can find the crossing rather than hunting for it among car parks and harbours. They come from the open map and work everywhere, which matters for the island hopping and fjord crossings a road route alone will not show you.

EV chargers work everywhere now. Open Charge Map has always covered the world, but Radar was still asking it for Great Britain alone, left over from its British days. A charger search in Oslo or Seville came back empty, and an empty answer from a source that is working looks exactly like a country with no chargers in it.

Northern Ireland gains its libraries, all 98 of them, from Libraries NI. Northern Ireland now has the places, the food hygiene ratings, the fuel prices, the toilets, the cash machines, the LPG stations, the launderettes, the road hazards and its own library data. We are working through the rest one at a time.

Around the app

The layer buttons are always there, including the layers that only cover some countries. They used to come and go with what was near you, which made the row change shape as the map moved and left you unable to switch a layer off from somewhere it had nothing to draw. A count of zero is an answer.

The radius is a slider again. The row of distance buttons we tried turned out worse: it is only as wide as the space it is given, it scrolls sideways with no visible scrollbar, and somebody sitting on 20 miles saw 20, 30 and 60 and nothing to suggest the shorter distances existed. A slider spans its whole range whatever width it is in, so no distance can hide. The distances themselves are unchanged.

Zooming out offers to search again. The Search this area pill only watched the middle of the map, so widening the view to look further afield, the natural way to go hunting for more, moved nothing it was measuring and the pill stayed down. It now measures how far the map you can see reaches past the circle that was searched.

Smaller fixes you may notice:

• Searches and the map are quicker. Radar was fetching far more from its own copy of the map than any search could show, and drawing the London charging zones at a precision no screen can render.
• A search that fails because our end briefly went away is retried a couple of times, quietly. If it still fails, the message says the fault is ours rather than blaming a postcode that was fine all along.
• The search box was briefly drawing your text in its own background colour, so anything typed into it was invisible.
• The fuel price strip no longer leaves an empty yellow bar behind on searches that find no filling stations.
• The category chips are smaller when you are using a mouse, which saves a good deal of scrolling. A tablet is still treated as a touch screen.

Cookies

Radar now asks, once, whether you are happy with Google Analytics cookies, in a small bar at the bottom of the screen. Nothing is stored before you press Accept, Decline is as easy as Accept, and advertising cookies are off whatever you choose. Declining limits nothing: every part of Radar works the same either way. There is a new Cookies & analytics page with the detail.

Radar built into a Nomad campervan's screen never loads analytics and never shows the banner.

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.