Impacts from Autonomous EV Travel over Personal Aviation in Europe

Anthony Wiskich

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Autonomous and electric vehicles could shift personal travel from aviation to roads, changing a basket of external costs - climate, accidents, noise, air pollution and land. We estimate the effect for European personal travel with a parsimonious discrete-choice model of car, rail and air, whose substitution elasticity sets a nonlinear "modal cliff" - the car-to-air switch as distance rises - estimated on European modal splits. Re-parameterising the car for a mature autonomous electric fleet draws travellers from both aviation and rail: personal air passengers on land-connected routes fall by a quarter (24.6% centrally, 18% to 32% across plausible distaste for driving, the key uncertainty). Because emissions concentrate in longer flights cars cannot replace, the shift reaches about a fifth (19%) of land-connected aviation CO2e and cuts its external cost by as much: with an electric fleet a switched flight's warming is avoided almost in full, and short-haul switchers shed disproportionate noise and air-pollution costs. Automation neutralises driving's accident cost and electrification its climate cost, more than halving driving's external cost from 5.1ct/pkm to 2.2ct/pkm at a conservative 100€ per tonne CO2.

Keywords: aviation; autonomous vehicles; rail; modal substitution; external costs; discrete choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 Q54 R40 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2026-10
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:camaaa:2026-90

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