Following on from the Tweet detailing GT Academy‘s online participation, Kazunori Yamauchi has also Tweeted figures about GT5’s cumulative online racing to date – a truly staggering 36.4 billion miles in the 577 days since launch!

Numbers of this magnitude are difficult to comprehend without context, so here’s some equivalents:

GT5 players have driven the distance from the Earth to the Sun. And back. 200 times.

Or the distance from the Sun to Neptune. And back. Thirteen times.

In under 2 years GT5 players have driven three times further than Voyager 1 has managed in 35 years.

We’d still take 1,367 years to drive GT5 to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri…

The average increase in distance is 63 million miles a day, with GT5’s online players covering the same distance in 2 days as the entire GT Academy 2012 competition has so far! This corresponds to 2.6 million mph or around 730 miles per second, enough to:

Equal the record distance in the Nürburgring 24hr in 3.4 seconds

Drive from San Francisco to New York in 3.5 seconds

Drive from New York to London in 4.7 seconds

Drive from London to Sydney in 14.4 seconds

Drive around the Earth in the time it took you to read this article

Drive to the Moon in 5 minutes 27 seconds

Even though the average online race in Gran Turismo 5 is only just over 12 miles in length, the community as a whole is certainly getting their money’s worth from the game with each player driving nearly 5,000 online miles.