Are There More Doors Or Tires In The World
We all love a good debate, especially on the internet. One of the recent ones is whether there are more doors or tires in the world.
This debate began when Ryan Nixon from Auckland, New Zealand inadvertently saw his innocent debate with friends turn into viral online discourse after sharing what they were going back and forth about.
In the already infamous wheels vs. doors debate, wheels might seem like the obvious winner.
When New Zealander Ryan Nixon asked Twitter users whether they thought there were more doors or wheels in the world, he had no idea it was going to become an online war.
But that’s exactly what it became as mathematicians and statisticians have tried to solve the riddle.
Table of Contents
How many doors are there in the world?
Without getting too deep into the numbers, we can estimate that there are as many as 33 billion doors in the world. That’s between houses, apartment buildings, vehicles, and the cabinets, closets, and other compartments have doors inside them.
Some have insisted that everything with wheels also has doors. Besides, anyone who owns a wheel is living in a building with doors that outnumber the wheel. For example, You own two cars and one bike, you have ten wheels, but that’s twenty-eight doors.
That’s a lot of doors! But how does it compare to the number of wheels? Let’s take a look at wheels.
How many wheels are there in the world?
Truth is, it’s quite impossible to state an exact number of wheels in the world. That’s because more and more wheels are made every time as they have been making one for decades.
In 2020, about 152,971 passenger cars were manufactured and that’s not including the number of wheels turned out for bicycles, shopping carts, aeroplanes, office chairs, and non-Hot Wheels toys.
To get a decent estimate of the number of wheels in the world, let’s break down the different types of wheels.
Cars wheel
- Currently, there are over 1.446 billion cars in the world. Multiply that by four, the average number of wheels on a standard modern passenger car, and you’re looking at 5.784 billion wheels.
- Truth is most cars have the same number of doors and tires—but wheels are a very different matter entirely. That’s because wheels are wider than most people thought.
- Every car has a steering wheel. The gears that run your engine? Those are wheels, too. As a matter of fact, your car is full of both big and small wheels, which largely outnumbers doors.
Toy wheels
- Toys are another major source of wheels, from Hot Wheels cars to LEGOs to Tonka trucks, Razor scooters, and that Fisher-Price corn popper toy that toddlers push around.
- Hot Wheels alone has sold more than six billion cars, that’s about twenty-four bullion tiny wheels out there. Note that those wills don’t have working doors.
- Hasbro’s Tonka has sold millions of pint-sized construction vehicles, with over 15 million sales of the iconic yellow Mighty Dump Truck alone. Hello, that’s an additional sixty million more wheels.
Bicycles and motorcycles wheels
- Bicycles and motorcycles bring an additional two billion wheels to the table, and that’s not including gears.
- Other wheels include shopping carts, trailers, and furniture.
- Between cars, toys, and other wheeled vehicles, it’s already clear that wheels outnumber doors. But if you’re still not convinced, take a look around your home and neighbourhood.
Shopping carts, hand trucks, trailers, and baby strollers all have wheels, and no doors. If you’ve got any furniture in your home with casters, those count as wheels too. If we’re getting really technical about it, every single sliding drawer in your home requires at least a couple of wheels to operate.
Wrap Up!
Even though we admit that pretty much everything with wheels, except bikes. It’s nowhere compared to the total number of wheels in the world. In this article we have identified well over a possible 37 billion wheels in the world—way more than the number of doors.
