Advances In Wearable ‘Airbags’
Monday, May 20th, 2024
A few of the Tech-Air product line at Alpinestars.
I got a heads-up recently from Greg Drevenstedt editor’s column in Rider magazine that told me there have been significant advances in rider safety equipment of late. Figured I ought to look into it.
This “First Gear” column in the May 2024 issue was talking about inflatable vests made by Alpinestars. Said Greg in his column, “Recently we’ve added a new piece of protective gear to our arsenal that I’ve required all staffers to wear any time they are on a test bike or at a press launch: an airbag vest.”
The two vests he discussed are the Alpinestars Tech-Air 5 and the Tech-Air 3, priced at $789.95 and $599.95 respectively. But it turns out that Alpinestars has a much larger line of such gear. Mostly it’s jackets or vests but they do have one, the Tech-Air® 10 Airbag System, that also protects your hips. That baby will run you $1,099.95.
That ain’t cheap, and with good insurance you might pay less than that in hospital bills, but I think I’d rather skip the injuries altogether. The pain from my wallet is a lot more bearable than the pain from my body. Nevertheless, the Tech-Air 10 appears to be targeted for sale to racers so let’s go back to the vests.
First off, in terms of advances in technology, whereas old-style inflatable vests were triggered by a cord connected to your bike that activated when that connection was broken, these new units have gyroscopes with all kinds of computer programming to tell them when to deploy. Also of interest, they deactivate below a certain speed. As the material on the website explains without such deactivation you could have a situation where some buddy comes along and slaps you soundly on the back . . . only to have your vest do its thing. Not something you really desire.
When the vests do go off they pump air instantly into a series of tubes throughout the vest. It’s literally an airbag kind of thing. I don’t think it takes any imagination to see how that would provide you a lot more protection than just armored riding gear. Plus, you would wear the vest either under or over your regular riding gear so you’re not choosing one or the other, you’ve got both.
And the thing with under your other gear is that these things are remarkably slim. Uninflated it looks pretty much like another vest.
Not to make this simply an Alpinestars commercial, I searched for inflatable motorcycle vests and found that there are a variety of others on the market, too. The first one I looked at was Helite Moto. It turns out they also have inflatable jeans. Helite has both cord-activated models and electronically activated model vests. The latter run around $800.
And then on Amazon I found more, often at much lower prices, but all with the cord tech, not the gyros.
So first we had cars with airbags and they have saved many thousands of lives. Now the idea of an airbag for a motorcycle is a real thing.
When I was a lot younger I was poor and the question of whether to get something like this would never have come up because that’s just way more than I could have considered spending. Now I’m intrigued. Of course if I ever do get something like this you’ll read about it right here.
Biker Quote for Today
A motorcycle is an artist’s brush on the canvas of the open road.
