A motorcycle tearing down the highway, zigzagging between cars stuck in traffic, may look tough as hell, but in reality motorcycle riders are a particularly vulnerable bunch. If a rider falls off his motorcycle, there's very little to protect him from hard asphalt.
Air-bag jackets for motorcycle riders, which have been around for a few years, have attempted to cushion this fall, but they have had drawbacks. Namely a rip cord that attached the rider to the bike. The problem was that if the connection broke, the vest would inflate, said Claudio Bontorin, marketing and sales executive at Dainese, manufacturer of protective clothing for motorcycle riders.
"This means it could go off accidentally — if the cord got pulled by mistake, or when the rider comes off the bike in a slide when an air bag would not be necessary," he said.
Enter Dainese's new product, the D-Air vest. It doesn't have a cord and is instead triggered wirelessly to inflate in less than 30 milliseconds.
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This sounds like good news for bike riders, but whether bikers will want to cover up their favorite leather jacket with an air-bag vest is no sure bet. For example, Rudy Villasenor, a member of the San Francisco Hell's Angels, said he wouldn't sport the vest partly for this reason.
We'll know soon enough, though, when the vest hits the European stores in the next six months.
The D-Air vest system consists of a 10-by-5 centimeter electronic unit mounted under the steering wheel and a 2-by-3 centimeter control unit set into a front pocket of the polyamide vest.
The two are in constant communication through encoded radio frequency transmissions.
The system on the motorbike — dubbed the STM (Sensing Triggering and Memory) — consists of three microprocessors.
The first, the Tx (transmitter), continuously monitors acceleration and deceleration. The second, the Rx (receiver), controls the triggering of the air bags and connects to the third, the DU (display unit) — an LCD panel that keeps the rider informed if the vest's rechargeable battery requires juice and that all systems are go.
The D-Air vest features an automatic error diagnosis procedure to secure it against accidental triggering — no self-respecting rider wants to be showing off his driving skills only to have his vest inflate erroneously.
Inflation is triggered if the motorcycle undergoes a dramatic deceleration caused by a collision with an obstacle.
If the Tx records a marked deceleration it sends the information to the Rx where a sophisticated algorithm analyzes the impact level to discriminate a crash event from bumps, potholes or if the bike is simply performing an emergency stop.
"Every time the device is triggered it has a diagnosis system just like a computer when it's rebooting — it makes sure that everything is running properly," Bontorin said.
Once an impact is determined, the Rx sends a firing signal to the inflators in the vest.
"The vest has three metal Co2 cans incorporated into it. They are shaped like water bottles and are around 15 centimeters high and 8 centimeters in diameter," Bontorin said.
One can is located on either side of the vest, and the third lies horizontally in the back.
On receiving the trigger signal, the cans are set off, inflating three air bags inside the jacket, creating a cushion around the rider's back, hips and chest.
"The vest inflates to 90 liters," Bontorin said.
The vest maintains pressure inside the bags for 20 seconds after activation to prolong protection in case the rider is sent bouncing down the road or into another vehicle.
Despite all this added equipment, Bontorin maintains the vest, which weighs in at 3,300 grams, is comfortable.
"The jacket is bulky but no more that a puffy or down vest," Bontorin said. "The driver's movement are not restricted."
As an additional feature, the D-Air vest comes equipped with a memory chip that continuously records the last two seconds of data, so the last two seconds before a crash occurs are stored.
It records speed at impact and the rate of deceleration, allowing the speed of the other vehicle to be worked out.
"It records information sort of like a black box," Bontorin said. "It can be used for insurance purposes. It is also used to create a history for us of accidents. The more information we have on accidents the more we can improve our products."
The system also uses an ID smart card, so that each motorcycle unit will only work with one vest at a time.
One scenario the vest has not mastered, however, is a side or back collision. In these cases the air bag will only be activated if the motorbike is hit hard enough for the STM system to recognize the collision as a crash.
Another brick wall the vest may run into is acceptance in the biker community.
From a rider's point of view, there is not going to be much love for this device," said Philip Sause, program coordinator for the Maryland Motorcycle Safety Program.
"The advantages of an air bag in a car are obvious, but I'm not so sure that it'd be useful to have a motorbike rider go bouncing off down the highway," Sause said.
Villasenor agrees: "In a car it's a different story, you're surrounded, so protected … on a motorcycle when you're hit you're getting majorly hit, and this just wouldn't protect you."
Sause did think it might gain some popularity as a voluntary addition to protective gear but: "If the government tried to mandate wearing these, then the feces would hit the rotor fan."
Sause need not worry about this happening any time soon. Although the vest is set to go on the European market within the next six months, at an estimated cost of $2,000, there's no plan yet to market it in the United States.
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