Trucks still confined to the old Khandala Ghat are saving fuel and time as cars and buses shift to the new bypass, with heavy vehicles recovering momentum they lose to constant interruptions on the climb.
Commercial vehicle traffic on the Mumbai-Pune corridor could save about 2.7 crore litres of fuel a year, worth around ₹272 crore, since the new Missing Link drew cars and buses off the congested Khandala Ghat (Bhor Ghat), according to an analysis published on Friday by the Pune fleet analytics firm Intangles. The same reduction could avoid 64,905 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the company estimated. Anup Patil, its chief executive, said even “modest savings compound into material economic impact” on a corridor carrying this volume of freight.
The estimate is built from 1,849 commercial vehicles tracked across more than 2,200 trips, comparing the five days before the 1 May opening with the two weeks that followed. Medium commercial trucks gained the most on speed, up 18 percent, with travel time down 19 percent and fuel use down 17 percent. Three-axle vehicles cut travel time by 20 percent, the steepest in the study, while buses recorded the largest fuel saving at 24 percent per trip. Multi-axle trucks gained on all three measures.
The truck gains are indirect. Heavy goods vehicles are barred from the link, so they remain on the ghat, but with cars and buses gone, the road is far less congested. Indian trucks are underpowered under current BS6 norms compared with foreign markets, and lose momentum whenever a car cuts across their path, dropping into first gear and burning fuel to build speed again. Removing that interruption helps the heaviest vehicles the most. Hariharan Ravishankar, the company’s chief AI scientist, said the result was “not intuitive, but it is exactly what the physics predicts,” since vehicles most constrained on steep gradients gain the most once that constraint is lifted.
The 13.3 km, eight-lane Missing Link, built by the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, was inaugurated on 1 May and bypasses the steep Bhor Ghat near Khandala, cutting the Mumbai-Pune distance by roughly 6 km and travel time by 25 to 30 minutes. For the first phase, only cars and passenger buses are allowed. Trucks, trailers and hazardous-cargo carriers must keep to the older 19.8 km ghat section, with a review for goods vehicles due after the monsoon.
The faster run lets operators fit close to one extra Pune-to-Mumbai trip into existing duty hours, Patil said in an interview with Autocar Professional. According to Intangles’ estimates, an additional trip is worth roughly 250 kilometres, which carries weight in a market where trucks average about 250 kilometres a day, against 500 to 600 kilometres, and sometimes far more, in developed economies. The benefit reaches the wider freight industry, not just individual operators, he said.
“The safety-related issues have come down significantly,” Patil said. Hard braking, harsh acceleration, and the practice of coasting downhill in neutral to save fuel have all eased, which Intangles reads as a sign of lower driver fatigue, though it cautioned that any firm conclusion on safety would need longer tracking.
Other gains are not yet measured. Smoother running should cut wear on tyres, gearboxes, transmissions and steering, Patil said, but quantifying it needs data over many months. The after-treatment system, the hottest part of a diesel truck, should benefit from the lighter engine load, and higher sustained speeds make it easier for the diesel particulate filter to regenerate above 40 kilometres an hour, burning less fuel to clear soot.
One effect will not appear in the data. Trucks are often held before the toll because city entry rules bar them at certain hours, Patil said, so a driver who saves 20 to 30 minutes can replan a run around those windows, crossing Pune before stopping for the night. Measuring that would mean speaking to drivers directly.
Intangles said its fuel figures were not modelled but read directly from sensors that track flow at the points of injection, combustion and return, capturing fuel almost drop by drop and breaking it down by vehicle gross weight, a method patented in India and the United States. Speed and travel time came from GPS and location data. The company has about half a million vehicles on its platform, roughly 80 percent of them in India.
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