Today’s number is the estimated number of a calories that a Tour de France rider consumes in a single day. Now I’m cheating a bit with this number since it is a rough estimate instead of a more exact statistic.

5500 kcal per day for a Tour de France rider is still in­ter­est­ing though because it can be used for the sake en­ter­tain­ing com­par­isons. The average tour stage this year was around 209km, let’s call it 200Km.

Now let’s consider a car driving along the same stage as the Tour de France rider. Let’s be optimitic and say the car is modern, small, and well maintained– we will estimate fuel con­sump­tion at 20 MPG (or in proper units ~11.76L/100km). Such a car would consume 178610.88 kcal en route or in other words ~32 times what the human rider needed to travel the same distance.

Of course the car is much bigger than the human rider so we should take mass into con­sid­er­a­tion. A 2013 Corolla L weighs 2734lb (or ~1240kg) and let’s say that our rider is 150lb (or 68kg). The car’s engine spent ~144 kcal/kg to move the car from start to finish of the stage whereas the rider used ~80 kcal/kg (or 56% of what the car needed) to get from start to finish.

What’s do all these numbers mean? To me they mean that we (as a race) still have a long way to go in terms of making speedy personal trans­porta­tion an energy efficient means of getting around.