In 2006, registered vehicles in Australia drove a total of 209.4 billion kilometres – roughly equivalent to circumnavigating planet earth five million times. Passenger vehicles made up 156 billion kilometres of that travel. The total distance travelled was up 8.9 per cent up from 192 billion kilometres in 2002. The number of vehicles rose 11.7 per cent in that time, so while there are more in-service vehicles, they're each travelling less, on average. And 53 per cent of it occurred in capital cities, with 52 per cent of all travel not business-related. Getting to and from work accounted for 29.3 per cent of all passenger vehicle travel.

Also in that year Down Under:

• There were 14.4 registered vehicles.
• These consumed a total of 29 billion litres of fuel
• Of that, 19 billion litres was unleaded petrol
• Passenger vehicles used 16.3 billion litres of unleaded petrol
• Diesel vehicles consumed 8.6 billion litres – 6 billion of those by trucks
• Each registered vehicle drove, on average, 14,600km
• NSW had the largest share of total kilometres travelled (29 per cent) and the highest number of registered vehicles (4.3 million)
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics