8 2GN The Sunday Times April 10, 2022NEWS
UK charging points. “Successfully
charged yesterday but only by confirm-
ing on café wi-fi. Very dodgy EE signal.
Relying on a mobile signal in the Dales.
Who thought that was a good idea?”
Often the motorist may believe the
charger is out of order, when in fact the
problem lies in the lack of mobile signal.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC
Foundation, the independent research
body that produced the study, said:
“There are few things more frustrating
for EV drivers than turning up to a charge
point that they can’t activate. [This] then
fuels ‘charge anxiety’ among those as yet
unpersuaded that an EV would work for
them.
“Two things need to happen. First, we
need an accurate picture of mobile signal
connectivity across the road network, so
that charge-point providers know in
detail what’s available. And second, we
need the charge points themselves to be
kitted-out appropriately so that they
function wherever they’re located and
whichever mobile network their users
subscribe to.”executive producer, was
creator of Attenborough’s
Blue Planet II.
“Their deliveries are
different. The job of narrating
is you bring your own
personality to it, and they are
different personalities,”
Honeyborne said. “Both [are]
exemplary.”
Sophie Todd, the series
producer who directed
Obama’s scenes on location,
said that he was hands-on,
from watching early video
and offering critiques to
tweaking the script “if we had
gone a bit too British”.
Obama protected more
wild spaces than any other
American president, having
placed 548 million acres of
habitat under conservation.
Theodore Roosevelt, the
founder of America’s
national parks, protected
290 million.Attenborough will go up
against Obama this week, as
the 95-year-old naturalist’s
new documentary about the
demise of the dinosaurs is on
BBC1 on Friday.
The pair have crossed
paths before. In 2015, Obama
invited Attenborough to the
White House for an interview
about conservation and
climate change, and gushed
about his films. “I’ve been
a huge admirer of your
work for a very long
time,” Obama told him.
“You’ve been a great
educator as well as a great
naturalist.”
Each episode
in the five-part
series, which
starts on
Wednesday,
begins and
ends with
Obama onlocation, talking about his
own experiences.
The opening episode starts
in Hawaii, where he grew up
and his “love of the natural
world began”.
He later travels to
Indonesia, where he spent
some of his childhood;
Monterey national park in
California, where he
honeymooned with his
wife Michelle; and his
father’s birthplace of
Kenya. Viewers of
Attenborough’s
documentaries will
recognise the style: James
Honeyborne,
Obama’s fellow
Obama
travels the
world to see
animals like
the rhesus
macaqueElectric cars
immobilised by
bad phone signal
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary,
who bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2019, has
admitted that weaknesses in the network
of public chargers are an obstacle to the
goal of increasing the number of fully
electric vehicles on the road from
450,000 to ten million by 2030.
The government has said it will spend
£1.6 billion on expanding the public
charging network from 30,000 to
300,000 chargers by 2030. This exceeds
the 66,000 spaces at petrol stations
because it takes so much longer to charge
up a car than to fuel it.
The 70 per cent of the population with
private off-street parking will be able to
install home chargers. Grants of £
apiece have been claimed by 277,
households, but the pot of money has run
out. From June, all new homes, or those
undergoing “significant” renovation,
must have vehicle charge points.
For longer journeys, motorists have to
rely on public chargers, which cost more
than charging at home and can involve
juggling dozens of payment cards and
phone apps.
Quentin Willson, who leads the Fair-
Charge campaign to improve support for
electric vehicles, said: “We’re asking con-
sumers to jump through hoops. All these
charges ought to be done with simple
contactless cards, so you pay for your
electricity like you pay for your petrol. If
we continue to make it difficult for con-
sumers to change their behaviour and
buy electric cars, and not have confi-
dence in the infrastructure and whether
it works or not, we’ll lose the battle.”
Ofcom said the government’s shared
rural network strategy was increasing
mobile reception, and added: “Ensuring
reliable mobile connections at
charge points will require
energy providers to work
directly with mobile oper-
ators, which we are ready
to help with.”
@NicholasHellenEfforts to convince motorists to switch to
electric cars are being undermined by the
struggle to use public charging stations in
areas of poor mobile phone reception.
Most chargers require use of a smart-
phone app, and while customers making
999 calls can roam across other provid-
ers’ networks, they cannot do so for any
other reason.
A task force appointed by Boris John-
son has urged Ofcom, the telecoms regu-
lator, to publish maps warning motorists
when charging stations are in mobile
“black spots” — areas without reception —
or “not spots”, where one or more of the
four UK networks — EE, Three, O2 and
Vodafone — does not work.
A detailed study for the electric vehicle
(EV) energy task force checked whether
motorists were able to use their phones
to turn on and pay for charging via an
app. A problem was identified along
more than 20 per cent of the length of A
roads and B roads in 22 local authorities.
Remote parts of the British Isles were
worst affected, with 56 per cent of Argyll
and Bute, in Scotland, lacking sufficient
connectivity for reliable charging. But
there are also significant gaps in the
home counties, with Sevenoaks, Kent,
and Maldon, Essex, at 11 per cent.
In Richmondshire, North Yorkshire,
28 per cent of the roads had gaps in con-
nectivity. A motorist at a PodPoint char-
ger at the Hawes National Park Centre,
in the Yorkshire Dales National Park,
vented his frustrations on a forum for
customers of ZapMap, an online map ofBeware if you’re relying
on a public charger to get
you to your destination.
If there’s no mobile
coverage, it may not workNicholas Hellen Transport EditorDrivers must
juggle apps and
payment cardsCars like the
Tesla Model 3
may be at riskYes, we can... be the new Sir David.
Obama presents Netflix nature show
Anyone daring to present
glossy natural history
documentaries is bound to
draw unfavourable
comparisons with Sir David
Attenborough, but that
prospect does not seem to
daunt Barack Obama.
The former president will
channel his inner naturalist
this week as he fronts a new
Netflix series about the
world’s national parks. It is
his first on-screen presenting
role since signing a
multimillion-dollar
production deal with the
streaming giant in 2018.
In Our Great National
Parks, Obama, 60, travels the
world to see hippos surfing in
Gabon, Chilean pumas
hunting and the giant titan
arum blooming in the
Indonesian jungle.Liam KellyNETFLIX