MBCNSW April 2026 Night Drive – Old Northern Road
Last night was our first night drive since January, the February and March night drives both being rained out. After a bit of rain the night before, it turned out to be a lovely evening.
This was also the first drive we using a new navigation app the club has purchased called ‘Tourboss’. I was quite keen to try it as at night. I can really only see two cars behind me, so its not always clear if the group is still together or not. The tourboss app shows me the locations of all the cars on the drive.
We had a pretty good turn out, probably a combination of the good weather and not having had one for a couple of months. I took my 1978 450SE. As well as my car was a C123 280CE, R107 280SL, C107 450SLC, C126 380SEC, W124 300E x2 & E320 and S124 300TE.
We had originally planned to meet on the eastern side of Galston Gorge and include that in the route. The Gorge had been closed earlier in the year for roadworks. There was a lot of conflicting data about if it was open at night or not. Since it wasn’t that clear, I decided not to include it. I left a bit early to get to the drive, and found it was in fact open.
Our new starting location was outside Galston shops. From there we headed out to Cattai Ridge Road, before taking Wisemans Ferry Road up to the Old Northern Road and then the Old Northern Road back down to Dural Maccas. This is a route we’ve done a few times before and I always really enjoy it. There is generally not a lot of traffic at night and there is a nice mix of tight corners and faster sections.
Overall I thought the tourboss app worked reasonably well. I used it to Navigate to the start point. That experience was so-so as the route it took wasn’t the one I would have chosen. More importantly it lacks speed camera location information, and Sydney is bristling with them. So in future I would probably use Waze to get to the location.
The experience for the users on our drive was pretty decent. I set the route up in the admin portal which includes all the waypoints. Tourboss the generates a six digit code. That code was in our event booking system, along with details of how to get the app. Everyone turned up with the app installed and with the code entered, so they were ready to go.
When the event is started, it then shows the location of all the other cars. It also pre-downloads the maps, which is quite good if going through areas with poor mobile coverage. As the ‘tour leader’ I had a few different views I could use. One as a normal navigation system and then one where it was more about showing me the location of the other cars. Without reading glasses, I couldn’t see the actual names of the people, but that probably wasn’t important as I could see the spread of the icons. For example, for a while two cars fell behind for a bit and then later caught up. Something I was able to see in real time.
One of the best things was that you don’t need to hit ‘continue’ when you get to a waypoint like with google. For a pre-planned route it was pretty seamless. On the downside, the lack of speed camera, roadworks and hazard warnings that waze gives you is a negative, as is the lack of dark mode at night. We also had one member who has a phone with a square screen and the app couldn’t handle that.
There was also one situation where it went a bit haywire. All of a sudden it thought a roundabout that was 7km away was actually 250 meters in front. Then it got confused and started slowly increasing the distance to where it was. I knew that section of road pretty well, so it was obviously nonsense, but it would have been confusing if I hadn’t. It wasn’t just me that experienced that, and it happened on a bit of the drive where the route crossed over itself, which may have been the cause.
Overall my verdict is that the app is pretty useful for running a group driving event. In an ideal situation I would probably want two phones running, one for this and one for waze. It will be a useful addition to our night drives.
The drive itself was great and all the cars performed well.
