How fast is Santa’s sleigh?

Santa lives on speed. No, not like that — what we mean is that jolly old Saint Nick might only have to work one night a year, but in that night he has to cover the whole world, visiting every house, delivering everything from the latest Xbox to plain old Christmas joy to one and all.

Which got us thinking — just how fast is Santa’s sleigh? How rapidly do those reindeer have to pull the sleigh to be able to cross the entire world in just a few hours? And how would that compare to the fastest cars we’ve tested at Carwow?

Astonishingly, there is an answer, and it’s not just ‘magic’ — although clearly magic has to come into it somewhere, or none of it would work. However, the egg-heads at the University of Arizona have crunched the numbers and it turns out that Santa’s sleigh has to travel at 650 miles per second to do the journey before the sun comes up.

That’s per second, not per hour. That’s 3,000 times the speed of sound, but if that seems astonishing, it’s — thankfully for Santa and for everyone who’s asked for a new bike this year — still well within the realms of physics, and quite a bit slower than the speed of light.

At 650 miles per second, Santa’s sleigh would simply annihilate even the fastest cars we’ve ever tested. Even assuming that the sleigh takes a bit of time to get up to speed, its acceleration would have to be phenomenal — around 21.5 miles per second per second.

Now, the fastest car Carwow has ever tested is the experimental McMurtry Speirling, which accelerates from 0-60mph in just 1.4 seconds. That gives it an acceleration speed of just 0.026 miles per second per second. In other words, the sleigh can accelerate ten times faster than the Speirling, thanks to an estimated 6.47-trillion (yes, trillion) brake horsepower. What’s he feeding those reindeer?

That means that the McMurtry’s 1/4 mile time of 7.97 seconds is toast. The sleigh would cover that distance in just 0.01 seconds.

Of course, the Speirling has to carry just one person, but Santa’s sleigh has to carry all of the toys needed for all of the world’s children. Calculations by the website Experimentary have shown that the estimated payload of the sleigh would have to be around  four million tonnes at takeoff (although, like a Formula One car burning off fuel, that weight would reduce as the sleigh travelled, so it’s possible that the Santa might be able to push it even faster towards the end of the night, when most of that weight has gone).

Four million tonnes doesn’t look like a lot on paper, but think of this — the one-time largest cargo aircraft of all time, the Antonov AN-225 Myria, could (when it still existed) carry a maximum payload of 250,000kg, or 250 tonnes. Which means you’d need 16,000 AN-225 transport aircraft to match Santa’s payload capacity. Or, to put it in road-going terms, 2.6 million Ford Transit Custom vans, assuming each of the Transits was working at its maximum 1.5-tonne payload capacity. That’s more than a quarter of the total number of Transits ever built since the van was first introduced in 1965.

So, Santa’s sleigh is faster than the fastest space probe, makes the incredible McMurtry Speirling look like a Nissan Micra, and can carry enough stuff to make a white van man go green with envy. No wonder it has to run on magic.

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