Here at Leasing Options, we had a rather unusual thought the other day… How far do we travel in cars every year? And we’re not just talking about the guys and gals in the office, not just the people in Manchester where we’re based, and not even everyone in the country. We mean, how far does everyone in the world travel every year in cars if it was all totalled up?
It’s quite a big question, and quite tricky to calculate, but let's give it a go. Read on to discover our findings or you can check out our visualised version here.
How Far Does The World Travel Every Year In Cars?
According to a Hedges Company report published in March, there are around 1.446 billion cars on Earth in 2022. If we then say for argument's sake that all cars in the world travel the same distance as the average yearly car mileage in the UK, which is 7,400 miles according to NimberFins (mileage pre-COVID-19), if we multiply those together, we get 10,700,400,000,000 or 10.7 trillion miles, a colossal figure. But just how far is 10.7 miles if a car were to drive in a straight line? See that visualised here!
So we now know how far cars would go over a full calendar year, so now let’s break the number down into how far we’d go in six months, one month, week, day, hour, minute and second.
Six Months
Across six months the total would come to 5,350,200,000,000 miles. This would get us close to travelling the distance of one lightyear.
One Month
In a month we’d travel 891,700,000,000 miles. This is 2.6x the total distance travelled by Californian drivers per year.
One Week
205,776,923,077 miles is how far we’d travel into space off the back of a week’s worth of the world’s car mileage. This is over 2.7x the distance cars in the UK travel every year.
One Day
In just one day, the world travels 29,316,164,384 miles. This would be enough to travel to Neptune, and back, five times.
One Hour
In the space of one hour, the world travels 1,221,506,849 miles. This is nearly double the distance it is to Saturn.
One Minute
Every minute the world travels 20,358,447 miles. Venus is only 5,000,000 miles further.
One Second
Every single second, the world as a whole travels 339,307 miles. That’s nearly 100,000 miles more than all the roads in the UK put together. If you went in a straight line off the planet, you’d pass the moon and still have another 100,452 miles left to go.
What Does 10.7 Trillion Miles Equate To?
10.7 Trillion Miles is hard to get your head around. Here are some stats to help you get a better idea of how far it is and what it equates to.
Lightyears
Simply put, 10.7 trillion miles is nearly two lightyears! It’s true. One lightyear is said to be 5.88 trillion miles, according to EarthSky, which means if we combined the world’s annual mileage, you’d end up at 1.82 lightyears. Mind blowing!
Cost To Travel
The current average price of petrol today is 164.59p per litre, which is the same as £0.21 per mile. If we times that by the 10.7 trillion miles travelled by all the world’s cars over a year, you’d have to pay a total of £2.247 trillion.
Emissions
The emissions from one medium-sized car travelling one mile is 0.11 of kgC02, according to the RAC. This means the total for all cars travelling the combined 10.7 trillion miles would equate to 1,117 trillion kgC02.
This is the same as
- 132.4 billion gallons of petrol consumed.
- 1.3 trillion pounds of coal burned.
- 2.7 billion barrels of oil consumed.
- 148 million homes powered for a year.
- Avoid 407 million tons of waste being recycled instead of sent to landfills.
- Carbon sequestered by 19.5 billion tree seedlings grown for 10 years.
As you can see, the figures are quite staggering. It also shows why moving to electric is becoming ever more important. Here at Leasing Options, we have a huge range of electric cars to lease, perfect for those looking to reduce their carbon footprint. If you need any assistance when selecting a car, or have any other questions, our amazing team is always on hand to help with anything you may need.
Methodology
- All data is accurate as of May 2022.
- 2019 data was used for the average UK car mileage due to COVID-19 to get a closer representation of “normal life”.
- Emission equivalents were calculated using the epa.gov site.
- Petrol price per litre, petrol price for one mile and emissions for an average medium-sized car were calculated using the rac.co.uk site.
- All other data and sources have been highlighted throughout this report.
