Speed is a strange thing. After half-an-hour of sustaining speeds well above 100kmph, slowing down to 80 or 90 feels like you have almost come to a standstill. The lane markings on the road don’t pass you by quite as fast. It is all quite relative. Sustaining triple digit speeds for long on Indian roads is a strange experience.
But the Delhi-Dausa stretch of the New Delhi-Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway ensures you get in that zone.
If the first stretch of the road is any indication, you can pretty much set your vehicle’s cruise control at 120 kmph, which is the speed limit on this new stretch of asphalt. And if your vehicle has something like ‘lane keeping assist’, put it on and well, technically, your car could do the work for you.
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An expressway in Inda
Seeing me drive on this 10-lane road in a powerful German-built convertible with the roof down, you could have told me I was in the American north-east, the only other part of the world where I’ve driven where the roads are so wide and so straight. Some could say that the road alignment is ‘boringly’ straight with almost no traffic. And given that it was the end of February, I was very grateful I was inside such a car on this road. I was driving the 430-horsepower Mercedes-Benz E53AMG Cabriolet. Ordinarily, I might have written that having such a powerful car in India, let alone one where the roof comes down, is rather pointless. But on this road, on a bright, sunny day, the temperature a notch above 30 degrees Celsius, it was the perfect car.
Of course, you can put on the driving aids, but I did not. I remembered what I’d been taught when I was learning to drive. You have to have a 360-degree awareness of your surroundings, especially in India. On the way back from Lalsot, where the first open stretch of this new expressway ends, I saw a group of schoolkids trying to cross the road. This despite the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) building the road at a height, and enough underpasses for locals to cross.
There were also motorcyclists on small 100cc bikes despite the stretch being strictly out of bounds for them. This is ‘unfair’, as some might argue, but keeps them safe. With a speed limit of 120 kmph, the wind buffeting from cars passing at high-speed could knock motorcycles and scooters off. The barriers themselves, wile up to specification, were low and one wondered if they could keep a heavy truck contained. There were no barriers on the central verge.
Make no mistakes, I am very impressed and very proud of the fact that we have built such a road in India. But it is not perfect, not just because of the things I have mentioned above but because of the users. Driver education is lacking in India. Despite four lanes plus an emergency lane on each carriageway, trucks were plying on the right-hand side. There was always a small hatchback pottering along at 70-80 kmph (fast for that car) on the same overtaking lane. Yet, at the same time, there were other cars bending the speed limit to their will. But things change and become better with time when it comes to road discipline. Global examples tell.
As a rookie reporter visiting China in 2001, I got a chance to see how the country was just beginning its massive infrastructure buildout. Traffic on the highways and inside Shanghai was chaotic with rules being freely flouted and vehicles with completely different speeds trying to occupy the same stretch of road. Cut to 2018—the last time I went to China. There was a sea change. Traffic was much more orderly in Shanghai, better than New York City, one could argue. On the highways, other than the occasional supercar, everyone followed the speed and lane rules. In two decades, the country had changed. That behaviour will also come to India as our drivers become used to such infrastructure and learn to optimise its usage and understand safety better.
But to achieve that, China changed the way they issued driving licenses. They doubled down on driver education, especially in schools. India under Narendra Modi wants to emulate China in many ways, including the way it is building infrastructure and the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is the best example of that. It is not the only new Expressway being built in India though and it is not just the NHAI building such roads. Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh is building expressways at a fantastic pace — I recently drove on the new Bundelkhand Expressway as well, which is another fabulous road. There is also the upcoming Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway.
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Roads, speed and safety
New roads like these will inevitably lead to increased sales of powerful cars like the AMG E53 I was driving, even if they might be electric ones. And that will inevitably lead to accidents, at least initially. An October 2022 accident on the Purvanchal Expressway in north-eastern Uttar Pradesh where the occupants of the car were driving at speeds above 230 kmph in a German sedan while shooting a live video to broadcast on social media is a case in point.
That is not to say that we should not build such roads that are capable of giving high-speed experiences. Because the very thought of being able to drive between Delhi and Mumbai (okay, Gurugram to Panvel) in under twelve hours is mind-boggling. Give credit where it’s due. This road is the ultimate proof of the massive infrastructure build-out in this country and I’m sure I will be driving up and down this road many, many more times in the coming years.
However, I am also glad that the first time I went on this road, I was rocketing with the roof down on the Mercedes-Benz AMG E53. What a car! What a road! What a day!
@kushanmitra is an automotive journalist based in New Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)