If you've ever crashed a modern car, then you know all about airbags. Spurred on by product liability lawyers and safety Nazis worldwide, car firms have rammed more and more of the exploding pillows inside their products. The idea is pretty simple - an ECU 'brain' is wired up to various accelerometers and sensors, and when it senses a sudden, heavy impact, it assumes you've had a wreck. Within a few hundredths of a second, it sets off a small explosive 'gas generator' inside what's essentially a big balloon hidden in the steering wheel or dashboard. Almost instantaneously, the balloon inflates into a soft, shock-absorbing cushion, preventing your head from slamming into the interior and turning your skull into hamburger. Frankly, the car interior designers of the 1960s would be appalled. Instead of the sharp-edged, chrome-plated spiky interiors of something like a '63 Chevy Corvair, some cars are actually now more comfortable after being crashed than before.
Of course, crashing on two wheels is inherently much more random, and without a seatbelt holding you in place and a solid steel shell around you it's hard to see what part they could play in preventing an injury. Honda had a go with the Gold Wing, but generally speaking airbags don't work on a bike.
...Or could they? A bit of lateral thinking says if you mount the airbag directly onto the rider himself and somehow set it off in a crash, it could help prevent injury. An airbag around your neck might prevent a broken collarbone, shoulder injury or even a broken neck. And if it was integrated into your helmet an airbag suit could result in much more substantial protection during a crash.
The main problem for a rider-mounted airbag system is working out when the unit should go off. It's pretty easy in an automobile-an accelerometer mounted in the car tells the ECU about any hard impacts. If they're above a certain threshold, then the control unit fires the airbags, and you land in a nice cozy pillow rather than a hard plastic dash.
But it's not so easy with a riding suit. For a start, if your body receives a really hard impact then it's probably a bit late to be setting off any airbags. The cushioning really has to be in place before you hit anything to help prevent or reduce injuries. And where would you mount the sensors?
A false deployment would be bad news too - imagine you're barreling into a fast corner, leaned right over, and a stray bump on the road jars you in just the wrong way and your suit airbag goes off. At the very least it'd take your mind off where you're heading, while at worst it'd provoke just the sort of crash the suit 'thought' was happening.
Great ideas are often the...
Great ideas are often the result of a few sketches during cocktail hour. Such was the case with the notion of an airbag-equipped leather suit.
Currently there's no easy way of setting off airbags in a suit electronically. The solution used by all the systems on sale at the moment is to use a cable connected to the bike. When you have a crash and fall away from the bike, the cable pulls the trigger on a gas bottle attached to the airbags. Italian firm Spidi has used this system on jackets and leather suits for several years now, as have a few smaller firms, especially in Japan. The systems work well, but having to attach a lanyard to your bike every time you get on and off is a chore. The trigger mechanisms are deliberately set so they require a large force to set them off, meaning it's unlikely you'd set it off by getting off the bike and forgetting to unclip. But there's still the chance of a false deployment, as well as the inconvenience of the cable attachment.
But Italian gear company Dainese is working on a much more high-tech solution. The firm's always been at the forefront of new, high-tech protective riding gear - it pioneered the back protector with Barry Sheene back in the 1970s. And its engineers weren't happy with the primitive lanyard method of setting off an airbag.