Hovding - the airbag helmet

Badrod

Todays internets have thrown up (literally!) this wee gem!

http://www.hovding.com/en/how

and crash testing ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... VZ0qiA-jBY


I vote for these to be mandatory within 2 years!

tgotb

Old news. I see nothing wrong with normal helmets, and would refuse to wear one of these even if they were mandatory.

Ignoring the perennial debate[*] about whether or not to wear a helmet, if I wear a helmet I want it to be reliable. The best way to make something reliable is to keep it simple, and a self-inflating airbag is a whole lot more complex, with many more points of failure, than a lump of plastic and polystyrene strapped to my head.

[*]If this thread ever makes it to a second page, it will have turned into a rehash of the normal helmet debate long before that point...

Hoopdriver

An utterly preposterous invention.

dhope

Was a thread on this a month or two ago. To dismiss it as unreliable seems to be a bit lazy. Is there any evidence it's unreliable? If it can inflate in a fraction of a second to cover a far greater area of the head than a traditional helmet would then surely it has the potential to be safer than a normal helmet. It could serve to protect the neck as well as head for example. Not saying it does at the moment, but why dismiss something just for being new.

Personally I don't trust these new fangled lumps of plastic and polystyrene anyway and still ride with one of these

tgotb

dhope wrote:

Was a thread on this a month or two ago. To dismiss it as unreliable seems to be a bit lazy.

I didn't say it was unreliable; what I actually said was that I want something reliable, and a conventional helmet fits that bill by being simple. Many moons ago when I trained as an engineer, one of the more important lessons was the KISS principle. As far as I can tell, this device seems to violate that principle in a fairly major way; at best it is hard to see how it can be *more* reliable than a lump of polystyrene.

There's definitely a market for it though; Mrs TGOTB (who refused to wear cycling gloves until she injured her hand falling off) would probably buy one if I didn't talk her out of it...