The Economic Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles

The CIE and WSP were engaged by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications to measure the potential economic impacts of CAVs. To do this task we have defined ‘economic’ broadly to cover all types of impacts that people care about, which includes:

impacts on costs related to road crashes, such as reduced mortality and morbidity, reduced property damage and reduced public health system costs,
impacts on transport costs (e.g. travel time and reliability and operating costs such as fuel), which can include reduced costs for business (which is a productivity improvement) or reduced costs to people (for example, being able to use time driving for alternative activities), and
impacts on the environment, such as changes to GHG emissions and air pollution, which in turn impact on people’s health and quality of life.

‘Economic’ is not restricted to examining changes that impact the Australian economy. For example, substantial benefits are expected for reduced fatalities from road crashes. Beyond any economic impact from loss of lives, this has an impact on the quality of life of the community.

CAV technology is in its infancy, making uptake, benefits and costs highly uncertain. At one end, with close to universal uptake of CAVs very substantial benefits are expected. However, the path to getting there could be much slower if uptake of CAVs is slow. Since CAVs have reduced benefits in mixed traffic, this would decrease total benefits significantly.

This report sets out expectations of the size of benefits and costs related to CAVs and how these change under a variety of scenarios and responses. This information provides a perspective on the expected range and scale of the returns from CAVs and the conditions that are likely to maximise these returns.

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