Mumbai to Vadodara in 4 Hours: What the New Expressway Stretch Actually Opens Up (and What It Doesn’t, Yet)

The Thane, Bhiwandi and Ghodbunder crawl that turns every Mumbai to Gujarat drive into a day-long slog is finally getting a bypass. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has confirmed that the 157km Maharashtra stretch of the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, the section that links the city to Vadodara, will open to the public by August 31, 2026. Five of its seven construction packages are already built and the rest are being finished in time for that date.

Here is why it matters if you actually drive this route. Mumbai to Vadodara today means fighting through Thane and Bhiwandi traffic before you even hit open highway, a run that regularly eats up 8 hours. Once this stretch is live, officials say that drops to roughly 4 hours, cutting your travel time nearly in half and skipping the Ghodbunder Road bottleneck entirely. That is the difference between a weekend trip that eats your whole Saturday and one where you are checked into your hotel by lunch.

The project itself is not small change. This one 157km stretch alone has cost around ₹24,000 crore to build, and it is a “greenfield” expressway, meaning it is a brand new access-controlled road built from scratch rather than a widened version of an old highway. That is what lets it carry high-speed traffic without the junctions, U-turns and roadside stalls that slow down a regular state highway.

But do not expect a clean run all the way to Gujarat yet

This is the part most of the excited headlines are glossing over. This Maharashtra section is only one piece of the larger Mumbai to Vadodara corridor, and the Gujarat side has hit real trouble. NHAI’s own project tracking shows three packages there, covering about 87km between Vadodara and the Maharashtra border, are running badly behind schedule. The delays got bad enough that NHAI terminated the original contractors on two of those packages and had to re-tender the work, and the revised target for that Gujarat stretch is now March 2028, not 2026.

What that means for you on the road: once the Maharashtra stretch opens on August 31, you will get a fast, modern run out of Mumbai, but you will still have to drop onto the older NH48 for a chunk of the Gujarat side until that 87km gap is plugged. Anyone planning to drive to Vadodara, Kevadia’s Statue of Unity, or on to Ahmedabad should budget extra time for that stretch rather than assuming a seamless expressway all the way through.

Once it is fully open, this stretch also connects into the existing Ahmedabad-Vadodara Expressway further north, so the smooth-tarmac portion of a Mumbai to Ahmedabad drive is only going to get longer over the next couple of years even with the Gujarat gap in place.

This is a genuine win for anyone doing regular Mumbai-Gujarat runs, weekend Saputara and Kevadia trips included, but the honest picture is a faster Maharashtra leg bolted onto an unfinished Gujarat one, not a finished expressway end to end. Plan your fuel stops and time accordingly until 2028.

If you are working out whether a road trip like this makes more sense in your own car or as a rental, The Spec’d’s EMI, running cost and true cost to own calculators are a good place to actually run the numbers before you commit to a highway-heavy ownership pattern.