New Roads: the chat-based AI road trip planner we tested

"We’ll take the long way home." Put your hand up if you’ve ever thought that… only to abandon the idea the moment you realise you’d have to actually plan the blasted route, and then just punch the destination into the satnav instead.

Yes, plenty of navigation apps will let you tick “avoid motorways”, but anyone who’s tried it knows the alternative it serves up can be… questionable. A new chat-based AI road trip planner, though, says it can do better.

New Roads: what the chat-based AI road trip planner promises

The tool is called New Roads, and it’s pitched as a way to generate personalised driving routes using details like what you drive, the sort of roads you enjoy and how much time you’ve got. On top of that, it can recommend hotels, lunch stops, and even ferry and train crossings en route.

In practice, it sounds a lot like the ChatGPT app you probably already have on your phone: you ‘chat’ with it, it gathers your preferences, and then it produces a fully bespoke itinerary that you can tweak to suit.

It’ll also provide booking links for any hotels, places to eat, or transport legs you might need - essentially acting like a travel agent. Once you’re happy, you can export the plan into Google Maps, ready to run via CarPlay or Android Auto.

And the logic checks out. Take the Hardknott Pass in the Lake District - one of the UK’s steepest and most intimidating roads. That’s a lane a small hot hatch might relish, whereas a supercar owner could sensibly want another option. This being TopGear, we’re speaking from, er… experience. Shudders.

We’re also told New Roads keeps improving as it absorbs community feedback, so future users should get smarter routes and better stop suggestions.

Putting New Roads to the test: London to Switzerland in a 996-gen Porsche 911 C4S

It’s all very well hearing what it claims to do, so we decided to try it against a real trip: a London to Switzerland run and back that we did last year in a 996-gen Porsche 911 C4S - a journey we’d genuinely spent hours mapping out. Would New Roads land on something similar?

First, we set out the brief: London to Switzerland and back in roughly one week, with no more than four hours of driving per day, taking in a few interesting cities, and with some famous Swiss mountain passes included.

Then came the inevitable Q&A. What car was it? What sort of vibe were we after? What style of hotel did we want? After it proposed passes including Susten, Grimsel, and Furka, plus points of interest such as Andermatt, Lucerne and Interlaken - all places we did visit on our trip - it produced an eight-day itinerary.

Five minutes of effort for something that close is pretty decent.

Where New Roads got it wrong

It wasn’t flawless, mind. It struggled to plot the route properly across the Swiss passes, repeatedly trying to send us around them - likely because those roads are currently closed, even though we’d specified we wanted to go in June.

It also had us driving from Interlaken back to London in a single hit, which is massively beyond the four-hour daily ceiling we asked it to stick to.

Coverage and expansion plans

So, verdict? New Roads looks like a strong place to start when you’re building a road trip - but we wouldn’t follow its output blindly, as with anything AI generated. At the moment it covers the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, and it says it’s aiming to expand to the rest of the world. So really, you’ve got even fewer excuses not to take the long way home.