BLOWN UP IN THE NAME OF SAFETY
How inflationary measures can help save lives when the worst happens
‘There’s plenty of space on a bike like an NC750’
It doesn’t take a genius to know hitting soft things is safer than hitting hard things. The idea of deployable airbags for cars dates back to the 1950s, but it took until the late 1980s for sensor and inflation technology to make them viable. So where were bikes in all this? Embarrassingly, nowhere. European research in 1973, and tests by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory in 1989, showed the airbag on a bike concept was plausible even on 125s, so in health-and-safetyconscious 2018, why is the only bike with an airbag Honda’s GL1800 Gold Wing?
History of inflation
Honda built the first airbag-equipped Japanese car in 1987 (the Legend) and started working on a motorcycle airbag in 1990. Over the next decade that development spread to smaller bikes, including scooters, but the anticipated proliferation of air-bagged bikes never arrived. Studies in Japan, the US and Europe all agree frontal collisions account for between 50 to 70% of all serious bike accidents and impact with either the road or another vehicle make up 75 to 96% of all serious rider injuries. You’d think airbags are a nobrainer, but it’s not that simple. Although it’s well-understood technology, Honda’s Wing-bag was recalled in 2016, 2017 and at the start of this year because of issues with the inflator degrading. The recalls were for Wings built between 2006-2016; the new GL1800 uses a different supplier, so although the issue is fixed, Honda’s airbag has been problematic to say the least.
Not all rosy
Complex interactions in a bike crash make it hard to design airbags and the rider’s position has a major affect. For example, a Wing rider, sat low in the bike, will tend to travel forwards rather than upwards.
In 2010 Honda revealed there had been only 14 occasions when the airbag had gone off on the Wing. The first was in 2007 in the US when the rider survived a low-speed T-bone with bruises. There’s also the problem of packaging: what do you leave off on, say, a scooter? Having said that, there’s plenty of room under the tank on, say, an NC750.