There is no fear of compulsion to wear these. It took something like twenty years to develop the hugely expensive and rather flawed front impact test for cars and that's saved probably tens of thousands. Helmets are even worse to test and in effect limit themselves to a few types of incident on the basis that there are a lot fewer where the lid breaks your neck than where simply hitting the ground fractures your skull. No approval test means no compulsion.
That doctor in the vid who claimed massive organ damage was the killer and that the jacket would prevent it would be ripped to shreds by the first comittee trying to develop a test to show which jackets were safer and which gimicks. There are no numbers because the medics don't collect data in a logical way (better things to do no doubt). How many of the organ damage deaths were caused by puncture wounds rather than sudden acceleration? How many were multiple injuries? How many would have been prevented by not riding in jeans and a T-shirt? The number 561 must include some who were in such bad collisions nothing except staying in bed would save them. There is no way this jacket would save even fifty riders per year never mind the full 561, that's just a salesman saying the word "potential" so quickly the journalists miss it.
The air bag I assume still has armour inside although from the vid it looked to be outside and the gas would simply help the armour get out of the way if you hit say a road sign?
Personally, I won't be getting one until we see how they perform. There is no prize for the first person to go under a truck because their airbag gimick went off unexpectedly and distracted them. Lanyard activation is a joke, the amount of slack and stretch in the wire are massive unpredictable factors in the activation sequence and allow the rider to simply forget it unless the bike had a warning light/cut out. A proper product would use two or three accelerometers just like a car and would need detectors for unfastened zips and the like, otherwise airbag deployment could help you roll out of the armour. Car airbags you'll note have a lot of logic associated with the seat belt that stops the air bags killing you. We've known what seat belts do in cars for fifty years, the air bags are a follow up to them the collapseable steering column/pedals.
I'm expecting the first properly tested version to be an inflateable neck brace for racers. It's a lot easier to define what it should do and when. Deploying out of the helmet means it's harder to put on incorrectly and we know lots about how helmets work. The chin buckle gives the electronic it's on/off signal. You are also working on an area without any protection now, so it's harder to make things worse.
Soda syphons and stuntmen really don't do it for me. Maybe they could get Clarkson or the Hamster to ride a rocket sled into a canal wearing one
Andy
