Munich, April 22nd 2025 – Driving an electric car is for sure a fancy way to make your trip more sustain-able. But what if you cannot afford one?

For a way fairer price, you can hop on a coach or train and share your ride with others. This will already help you reduce your impact on the environment tremendously: there is substantial evidence for this.

To mark Earth Day 2025, the travel tech global leader Flix released new data showing that passengers who chose FlixBus and FlixTrain in 2024 over private cars or planes helped avoid 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions worldwide. This is the equivalent of growing more than 24 million tree seedlings for 10 years. [1]

This resounding saving was estimated by comparing emissions of different modes of transport: on a per passenger-kilometer basis, [2] a FlixBus coach in Europe emits at least five times less CO2 emissions than private cars and at least 10 times less CO2 emissions than flights, [performing nearly as good as intercity trains] [3] This confirms that collective travel is at the same time a low-effort and high-impact choice. By matching affordable pricing with high environmental standards in more than 40 countries, Flix has already enhanced more sustainable travel for millions of passengers in a variety of geographies.

“We must enable all travelers to make the right choices, whatever their economic background. In 2024, millions of people chose to travel collectively instead of driving alone. This is climate action at scale, and we are eager to support it”, says André Schwämmlein, CEO and Co-founder of Flix.

While much of the climate conversation focuses on future technologies, Flix is proving that existing solutions like coaches and trains are already making a measurable difference.

Especially, coaches often stand out as a viable alternative to trains where railway operators are either absent or hardly running, like in rural or smalltown areas.

“It is high time that we debunked a myth: coaches are not the last resort for collective travel, but a ready-to-use option wherever trains cannot make it. We want to democratize sustainable travel, and coaches are the most powerful tool that we have to get there”, adds Schwämmlein.

While acknowledging the benefits of traditional coaches, Flix has been working for years on progressive fleet transformation through alternative drives and fuels, like electric and biogas. This is a key lever in Flix’s long-term strategy for decarbonization, pursued within the framework of the Science-Based Targets initiative and aimed at reaching Net Zero by 2040 in Europe and 2050 at the global level.

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[1] US Environmental Protection Agency: Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator – Calculations and References

[2] Passenger-kilometer is the unit of measurement representing the transport of one passenger by a defined mode of transport (road, rail, air, sea, inland waterways etc.) over one kilometer.

[3] Data stemming from own calculation, atmosfair analysis, UBA 2023, US EPA 2024. For more information, refer to Flix’s Avoided Emissions Reporting Criteria 2024, available at Flix Governance, Data and Policies