Almost exactly fifty years later, it still resonates with us, although its language and ethos may have dated over those five decades. But, with hindsight, was it really as revolutionary as history has made it out to be?

Well, yes. Yes, it was, and on a number of levels. For a start, it was the first film to show bikers and hippies getting along, respecting each other’s value and being essentially on the same side. There had been biker ‘flicks’ before Easy Rider but, in the main, they showed bikers to either be violent outliers or simply forming their own societies which weren’t actually so far removed in structure from mainstream life.

 

If you are one of the few people who’ve never seen Easy Rider, here’s the swiftest of all synopses. Two guys do a big drug deal in LA and then set out across country in search of spiritual truth. Along the way they meet hippies and ranchers who are good and small town locals who are bad. The guy who hooks up with them gets killed. They get to New Orleans and take acid. They head out east and are shot by rednecks in a truck.

But that’s putting it in the simplest of terms. The message of Easy Rider is how tough it is live outside the mainstream and how infuriated and angered the members of that mainstream will become if you try to throw off those shackles. Every character in Easy Rider who attempts to pursue their version of freedom comes to grief – the two main protagonists, Wyatt and Billy; George the alcoholic lawyer working for the American Civil Liberties Union; the members of the commune where Wyatt and Billy stay. Far from being a safe alternative haven, when they visit the commune they find it is being destroyed by people freeloading, while it’s pointed out that the crops these ‘city people’ have planted will fail. Again, there’s that idea that you can’t defy society’s norms – city people have no place trying to make their way in the countryside. Wyatt and Billy sleep under the stars not because they have some dreamy idea of freedom, but because even low rent motels won’t give them a room. It’s Jack Nicholson as George who sums up the whole premise of the film when he says; “What you represent to them is freedom. ’Course don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

 

But the film itself represented a move away from the studio system which had dominated the film industry for decades. It was incredibly rare for independent filmmakers to have a chance to create a movie – or certainly one that would be shown in mainstream cinemas – away from the control of a major studio. Yet it was that very studio system which actually inspired Peter Fonda with the idea of Easy Rider. While promoting Roger Corman’s film The Trip in 1967, Fonda listened to a speech by Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Association of America as he addressed Canadian theatre owners. Valenti asserted that Hollywood should stop making films that contained sex, violence and drugs and produce more family movies like Doctor Doolittle. Fonda went back to his hotel room, mused on Valenti’s words and decided to make a film which contained a lot of sex, violence and drugs. He’d even throw in motorcycles. There and then, in the early hours of the morning, he rang Dennis Hopper. Hopper agreed to star in and direct the movie and the rest is history.

Well, not quite. Nothing about the making of Easy Rider was easy. Ask any of the main five protagonists – Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson, writer Terry Southern, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs – and they would each have a different version of events (and you can’t ask them as all except Jack Nicholson, are now dead, making a definitive story impossible). Far from being the companionable friends portrayed on screen, Fonda and Hopper fought constantly during filming and, indeed, afterwards. When Hopper died in 2010, Fonda was barred from his funeral. They would argue for years over who had actually written the film, both cutting Terry Southern – who had contributed much of the writing – out of the picture.

Unusually for a major motion picture, much of the dialogue was adlibbed. To 21^st century eyes, much of it now seems desperately old-fashioned and cliched, but it was Jack Nicholson’s ability to take an idea and the barebones of a script and spin it into a monologue that really brought Easy Rider together and, even today, makes it relevant. Surprisingly, he is on the screen for just seventeen minutes of the film’s ninety-five minute running time.

 

Equally surprisingly, he wasn’t first choice for the role of George Hanson. Rip Torn had been earmarked at first for that character, but backed out of the project when Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him and made racist remarks about Texans during preproduction. (That incident would come back to bite Hopper who, in 1994, went on The Jay Leno Show and related the anecdote as if Torn had been the one to pull the knife. Rip Torn sued for defamation of character and won almost $1 million in damages.) It was felt that Nicholson couldn’t do a Texan accent, but it’s now difficult to imagine any other actor in the role.

Another first for Easy Rider was its soundtrack. Up until then, soundtracks had been written specifically for films (perhaps the exception being 1967’s The Graduate, and although that used existing Simon and Garfunkel tracks, Paul Simon also wrote fresh material for the movie), but Easy Rider put together a collection of ‘found’ songs which not only provided a commentary on the action, but stood up as an album apart from the film. Just one song, The Ballad of Easy Rider, was written for the film by Roger McGuinn of The Byrds with lines from one Bob Dylan. Fonda had asked Dylan to write the film’s theme song, but on finding that the two heroes are killed at the end, Dylan refused, instead scribbling the lines ‘The river flows, it flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be/Flow, river, flow’ on a napkin and telling Fonda to give it to McGuinn. When Dylan saw a private screening of Easy Rider and found he had been credited as co-writer of the theme song, he insisted that his name be removed from both the credits and any future releases of the song.

Part of the reason that, until then, soundtracks had been written for films had as much to do with money as creating the right atmosphere for the action on screen. Licensing individual songs was costly and a logistical nightmare – in fact, the music for Easy Rider cost twice as much as the film did to shoot. In the long run that wasn’t too much of a problem: Easy Rider cost under half a million dollars to make. It would take over $50 million at the box office.

 

But, of course, at this distance, the most important thing about Easy Rider to us is the bikes. Wyatt’s Captain America bike with its alarming rake and Stars and Stripes petrol tank is probably the most instantly recognisable motorcycle in the world. Even people who have never seen the film know it. No other bike on screen – not Steve McQueen’s Triumph in The Great Escape, not Arnold Schwarznegger’s Harley Fat Boy in The Terminator, not even Marlon Brando’s Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild One – can come close. But, for many years, like so many things about this movie, the very story behind the two motorcycles was cloaked in mystery.

That four Harley-Davidson Hydra Glides were bought from the Los Angeles Police Department (for around $500) because Harley-Davidson itself didn’t fancy being associated with the film and so refused the request for some bikes has been a long-established fact. But, for years, no-one seemed to question who had actually built the two choppers (Fonda’s bike was more radical simply because he was a more experienced rider than Hopper). If anyone thought about it, they probably assumed that Fonda had built them as he did strongly hint, and he certainly did little to disabuse anyone of that notion for some time.

Had any of the bikes actually survived, then maybe more questions might have been asked soon. But three of the bikes were stolen and the fourth crashed (presenting something of a problem when the campfire scene was filmed, which is why you don’t see the bikes in the background when you should). And here we disappear down another rabbit hole. Fonda said that he gave the crashed bike to Dan Haggerty (better known as TV character Grizzly Adams) who completely rebuilt it and sold it to the National Motorcycle Museum in Iowa. However, the museum apparently sold its Easy Rider bike in 2013 and says that the one currently on display is not the crashed Pan and their motorcycle is one of several built afterwards as promotional props.

Over the years, several ‘real’ Captain America bikes have surfaced, the waters muddied by the fact that Haggerty certified a few as the genuine article. In 2014, a bike claimed to be the last remaining motorcycle from the film and the one originally displayed in the National Motorcycle Museum was sold at auction for $1.35 million by movie memorabilia collector, Michael Eisenberg. It was authenticated by Haggerty (in spite of the fact that he admitted he’d authenticated a different Captain America bike years before) and by a letter from Fonda too, although he was to change his tune with the approach of the auction, saying “there is a big stinkin rat someplace in here” (forgetting that he too had vertified bikes as the bona fide item). Then, in direct contrast to the worldwide interest there had been before the sale, the auction result was quietly cancelled and the bike remains, apparently, unsold.

Oh, and then there’s the story that Dennis Hopper actually took one of the four bikes home and buried it on his ranch in Nevada where it was dug up by a contractor building a pool who gave what he thought to be junk parts to his son who built a bike… No-one has ever come forward to admit to stealing the three bikes from the film set. The statute of limitations has long passed on that crime, so tell us what happened to them! It’s very likely they were broken up and parted out immediately. Someone out there could be riding around on a bike with apart from one of the Easy Rider machines and as much of a valid claim to owning a real Easy Rider bike as some of those motorcycles which Dan Haggerty validated. And so it goes on and probably always will.

But back to the important matter of who actually built the film bikes. Even that throws up several versions of the truth. It’s only in recent years that it’s come to light that the bikes were the work of two African-American builders, their names lost – possibly deliberately – from the history of Easy Rider.

Clifford ‘Soney’ Vaughs was a black activist who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and became a documentary film maker. In an echo of Easy Rider, he was fired at by men in a pickup truck as he rode his Knucklehead chop through Arkansas in 1964 and was also arrested on several occasions while protesting at civil rights events. But he also built bikes (he was featured in Ed Roth’s legendary Choppers Magazine in 1967) and it was that combination of motorcycles and filmmaking that brought him into the orbit of Fonda and Hopper. He worked briefly on the set of Easy Rider, along with mechanic Larry Marcus, and was responsible for the building of the infamous bikes, although, not entirely… Another African-American, Ben Hardy bought the first two police Harleys at auction (although Fonda always said it was him), and Hardy built the two original motorcycles to Vaughs’ design while it seems likely that Vaughns constructed the other pair.

With the bikes handed over, these guys effectively disappeared. Vaughs had sued for severance pay after being fired and both he and Larry Marcus were paid $333, provided they signed a document agreeing that their names would not appear on the final credits. Not only were their names not mentioned on those credits, but their role (and that of Ben Hardy) in the creation of two of the most famous movie props of all time was completely obliterated. It wasn’t until 2006 that Cliff Vaughs was publicly credited for the first time as the creator of the Easy Rider choppers by Jesse James in his television series, The History of the Chopper. Sadly, that recognition came way too late for Ben Hardy who had died fifteen years before.

But what this film and two uncredited African-Americans did was to popularise choppers. Custom bikes had been around for years but suddenly here they were, in glorious Technicolor on the big screen, in spectacular riding shots created by Laszlo Kovacs (there are, I think, seven riding sequences in the film – Hopper had insisted on filming more than twenty!). Even if you hate the film, even if you think it’s all waffly hippie crap, you cannot deny the glory of those riding sequences that just make you want to sell everything, buy a bike and go riding across America. Not having too much in the way of vast scenic landscapes in this country, people could still emulate their screen heroes by building choppers (or, as Blackjack points out on page 91, making something inherently dangerous given the access to engineering for many and the limitation of parts available in the late 1960s and early ’70s!).

Would the chopper scene have become so big without Easy Rider? Yes, it probably would have done. By 1969, people had been building choppers in the United States for years. After all, millions of soldiers had been trained during the Second World War in engineering, welding and mechanics. They wanted excitement and, in an era when there was a huge post-war surplus of engines and materials, they had the wherewithal to build what they wanted and that was something lighter, faster and more fun to ride than the standard Harley stocker. As Triumph sent thousands of motorcycles to the US, those bikes too were cut up and transformed.

 

Two years before Easy Rider was released, Tom McMullen had started his infamous company AEE Choppers and had already built bikes like the Corvair Trike, while up in San Francisco a young man called Arlen Ness was already making a name for himself with his builds. Choppers Magazine started in 1967 too, Street Chopper in 1969 and Easyriders in 1970. It was all out there, but it’s arguable that two Panheads ridden by actors kickstarted the chopper scene into an international movement and for that, if nothing else, we should celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Easy Rider. 

EASY RIDER TRIVIA

·       In the film, the cocaine was powdered sugar (the budget wouldn’t run to the real stuff), the LSD was, according to Fonda ‘half an aspirin’, but the marijuana was all real!

·       80 hours of footage was shot. After Hopper took six months over editing, Henry Jaglom was brought in to cut it down to an hour and thirty five minutes while Hopper was sent to New Mexico on holiday, unaware of what was happening. Furious at the time, Hopper later admitted they did a good job.

·       Imagining the two main characters as modern day cowboys, Fonda named them Wyatt for Wyatt Earp and Billy for Billy the Kid.

·       Jack Nicholson was fourth choice for the character of George Hanson – after Rip Torn dropped out (no doubt peeved about his director pulling a knife on him), Bruce Dern was considered, as was Jack Starrett, best known for his role as Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles.

·       Peter Fonda’s character is only referred to by the name Wyatt once in the film in the final campfire scene.

·       Easy Rider was the favourite film of Charles Manson.

·       Bridget Fonda, daughter of Peter, who went on to star in such films as Single White Female, Jackie Brown and Lake Placid, was one of the children in Easy Rider’s commune scene. She was then five years old.

·       Toni Basil, one of the prostitutes in the New Orleans scenes, went on to have a massive worldwide pop hit in 1981 with Mickey. Now 75, her latest work was to choreograph Quentin Tarentino’s recent release, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

·       In the opening scene, Wyatt rides a Bultaco and Billy a Norton.

·       The original title was ‘The Loners’. Peter Fonda, Terry Southern and Cliff Vaugns all separately took credit for the title Easy Rider.

·       It was originally intended that the drugs the two main characters pick up in Mexico in the first scene would be marijuana until it was pointed out they couldn’t carry enough for such a big deal on motorcycles. Dennis Hopper vetoed heroin and so it was cocaine. Or powdered sugar (although we think Phil Spector would have noticed at the airport).

·       The bridge in the opening credits is the Old Trails Bridge on the California/Arizona border which once carried Route 66 across the Colorado River (the bridge now services a gas pipeline). It’s the same bridge crossed by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, with Tom Joad played by Peter Fonda’s father, Henry.

·       Before Columbia took up the picture, American-International Pictures turned down Easy Rider. Vice President Samuel Z Arkoff would say it was one of the biggest regrets of his life.

·       Captain America originally had a suicide shifter, but a hand clutch had to be fitted when Fonda couldn’t get along with it.

·       The original ending had Wyatt and Billy buying a yacht in Florida and sailing into the sunset.

·       The money to fund the film came from Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider through their creation of 1960 TV programme, The Monkees.

·       All three main characters had been in biker films before; Dennis Hopper had starred in The Glory Stompers (1967), Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels (1966) and Jack Nicholson in Hells Angels on Wheels (1967).

·       In 2007, Ohio lawyer and producer Phil Pitzer, sued Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider for the sequel rights to Easy Rider and won. His subsequent film, Easy Rider 2: The Ride Home, was released in 2012 and was about Wyatt’s family. Ever seen it? Us, neither, probably because it went straight to DVD.

·       The film crew didn’t have permission to shoot in the Catholic cemetery in New Orleans but went ahead anyway. The church was so horrified that no other films have been allowed to shoot there since. Interview With The Vampire (1994) and other subsequent movies had to be filmed in the Protestant Lafayette Cemetery.

·       According to Jack Nicholson, he, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda went through 155 joints while filming the campfire scene.

·       The scene at the beginning of the film where Wyatt throws his watch on the ground was filmed in Ballarat in Death Valley, California, just a couple of miles from the Barker Ranch where the Manson Family lived and where Charles Manson was arrested. Just a few yards from where the watch landed is an old Dodge Powerwagon which belonged to the Manson family. (It wasn’t, as popular legend has it, Manson’s own vehicle but probably belonged to either Bobby Beausoleil or Tex Watson).

·       When Dennis Hopper was asked by Peter Fonda to star in and direct Easy Rider, Hopper was on the point of giving up acting and becoming a teacher.

·       The Captain America flag worn on actor Peter Fonda’s leather jacket sold for $89,625 in the Music and Entertainment Auction in October 2007, in Dallas, Texas. The patch measures 14.5-inches by 11-inches.

·       The pin Wyatt wears on his jacket is an Office of the Secretary of Defense Identification Badge.

·       Peter Fonda broke three ribs, not from a crash but when pillion Jack Nicholson’s knees gripped him after, as Fonda put it, “the front end got a little squirrely”.

·       Many of the riding shots were filmed from a 1968 Chevrolet Impala.

·       Cliff Vaugns actually met Peter Fonda first when he was working in the newsroom at TV station KAMC. He was covering Fonda’s arrest for possession of marijuana and the two discovered they had a mutual love of motorcycles.

·       In 2012, Peter Fonda wrote to Cliff Vaugns to say, “I apologize profusely for not being more forceful about your role in their existence and their perfect design”, a classic case of too little, too late.

·       In the film’s final scene, the pick-up truck is never visible on the road except when it is being shown in close-up. As the camera pulls back after Wyatt’s bike explodes, it should be driving up the road but it’s nowhere in sight.

·       When Wyatt takes off his watch at the beginning of the film it’s an expensive Rolex. By the time it hits the ground it’s mysteriously become a Timex.

·       The Pine Breeze Motel where the owner switches on the NO VACANCY sign still exists and looks very much as it did in the film. It’s now an RV park on a dead end section of Route 66 in Bellemont, Arizona.

·       The NO VACANCY sign from the Pine Breeze Inn is supposed on display at the Route 66 Roadhouse Bar and Grill just down the road next to the local Harley-Davidson dealership. The only problem is, if you watch the credits to Easy Rider and then look at the sign hanging over the pool tables, you’ll see that it clearly isn’t the same sign!

·       If you know anything about the geography of the USA you will know that the route that Wyatt and Billy take jumps from New Mexico to Louisiana, missing out Texas and Oklahoma. Rumour has it that because the crew needed a break from the tyrannical Dennis Hopper and so took a different route to the director. It may also be that Hopper got cold feet about filming in Texas.

·       The final scene in which Wyatt and Billy was shot was filmed on North Levee Road (US Route 105), a country road outside Krotz Springs, Louisiana.

·       The redneck café scene, after which George is beaten to death, was filmed in Melancon’s Café in Morganza, Louisiana, about thirty miles north-west of Baton Rouge. It was a real business and the film crew had asked for it to be closed so they could shoot there. However, the owner didn’t believe they were for real and opened up anyway, which is how several of the locals were recruited to act in the film.

·       For years, the tiny town of Morganza failed to capitalise on its role in the film, hating how its townspeople had been portrayed as rednecks. Around twenty years ago Melancon’s Café was demolished and where the café stood is now an empty lot with the remains of some steps and a plaque on the pavement commemorating the site’s part in Easy Rider – and naming all the locals who took part. They do sometimes put up a plywood facade with a banner on it recreating of the café.

·       Despite their disagreements on who wrote Easy Rider, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern shared an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, losing to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

·       Arnold Hess Jr, a Point Coupee Parish deputy sheriff almost lost his job over the film. One of the Morganza, Louisiana, locals recruited to be in the film, he appeared on screen in his uniform with his Point Coupee Parish patch prominently displayed. Hess swore to his sheriff that he and other townspeople hadn’t realised they would be portrayed as intolerant rednecks and, when he did, he took no further part in the film. He kept his job and still lives in Morganza.

·       Dennis Hopper sued Peter Fonda in 1992, claiming he deserved all the credit for the script of Easy Rider, not Fonda. The suit was settled out of court. Then, four years later, Hopper filed a company against Fonda’s company Pando Productions which had made the movie, claiming that when the rights to Easy Rider were sold to Columbia Pictures in 1994, he received only a third of the proceeds and was in fact entitled to over 40 percent. That too was settled out of court. The rift was never healed and when Fonda tried to visit the dying Hopper, Hopper refused to see him and barred him from his funeral.

·       Both of Easy Rider’s stars later made car adverts which mimicked the film. In 1998, Dennis Hopper advertised the Ford Cougar in a commercial which featured original footage of Hopper as Billy on the Billy Bike to the tune of Steppenwolf’s Born To Be Wild. In 2017, Fonda, as the Wyatt character and wearing a copy of his Captain America jacket, made an ad in which he drives away from a biker café in a Mercedes-AMG GT Roadster. The soundtrack is – yes – Born To Be Wild.

 

These seem like easy questions, ones you probably think you can answer by reciting the lofty standards your helmet meets and the lofty price you might have paid for it. But the real answers, as you are about to see, are anything but easy.

There’s a fundamental debate raging in the motorcycle helmet industry. In a fiberglass-reinforced, expanded-polystyrene nutshell, it’s a debate about how strong and how stiff a helmet should be to provide the best possible protection.

Why the debate? Because if a helmet is too stiff it can be less able to prevent brain injury in the kinds of crashes you’re most likely to have. And if it’s too soft, it might not protect you in a violent, high-energy crash. What’s just right? Well, that’s why it’s called a debate. If you knew what your head was going to hit and how hard, you could choose the perfect helmet for that crash. But crashes are accidents. So you have to guess.

To understand how a helmet protects—or doesn’t protect—your brain, it helps to appreciate just how fragile that organ actually is. The consistency of the human brain is like warm Jello. It’s so gooey that when pathologists remove a brain from a cadaver, they have to use a kind of cheesecloth hammock to hold it together as it comes out of the skull.

Your brain basically floats inside your skull, within a bath of cervical-spinal fluid and a protective cocoon called the dura. But when your skull stops suddenly—as it does when it hits something hard—the brain keeps going, as Sir Isaac Newton predicted. Then it has its own collision with the inside of the skull. If that collision is too severe, the brain can sustain any number of injuries, from shearing of the brain tissue to bleeding in the brain, or between the brain and the dura, or between the dura and the skull. And after your brain is injured, even more damage can occur. When the brain is bashed or injured internally, bleeding and inflammation make it swell. When your brain swells inside the skull, there’s no place for that extra volume to go. So it presses harder against the inside of the skull and tries to squeeze through any opening, bulging out of your eye sockets and oozing down the base of the skull. As it squeezes, more damage is done to some very vital regions.

None of this is good. Helmet designers have devised a number of different liner designs to meet the different standards. The Vemar VSR uses stiffer EPS than most, but has channels molded in to soften the assembly (to ECE specs) and enhance cooling.

To prevent all that ugly stuff from happening, we wear helmets. Modern, full-face helmets, if we have enough brains to protect, that is.

A motorcycle helmet has two major parts: the outer shell and the energy-absorbing inner liner. The inner lining is made of expanded polystyrene or EPS, the same stuff used in beer coolers, foam coffee cups, and packing material. Outer shells come in two basic flavors: a resin/fiber composite, such as fiberglass, carbon fiber and Kevlar, or a molded thermoplastic such as ABS or polycarbonate, the same basic stuff used in face shields and F-16 canopies.

The shell is there for a number of reasons. First, it’s supposed to protect against pointy things trying to penetrate the EPS—though that almost never happens in a real accident. Second, the shell protects against abrasion, which is a good thing when you’re sliding into the chicane at Daytona. Third, it gives Troy Lee a nice, smooth surface to paint dragons on. Riders—and helmet marketers—pay a lot of attention to the outer shell and its material. But the part of the helmet that absorbs most of the energy in a crash is actually the inner liner.

When the helmet hits the road or a curb, the outer shell stops instantly. Inside, your head keeps going until it collides with the liner. When this happens, the liner’s job is to bring the head to a gentle stop—if you want your brain to keep working like it does now, that is.

The great thing about EPS is that as it crushes, it absorbs lots of energy at a predictable rate. It doesn’t store energy and rebound like a spring, which would be a bad thing because your head would bounce back up, shaking your brain not just once, but twice. EPS actually absorbs the kinetic energy of your moving head, creating a very small amount of heat as the foam collapses.

The helmet’s shell also absorbs energy as it flexes in the case of a polycarbonate helmet, or flexes, crushes and delaminates in the case of a fiberglass composite helmet.

To minimize the G-forces on your soft, gushy brain as it stops, you want to slow your head down over as great a distance as possible. So the perfect helmet would be huge, with 6 inches or mosre of soft, fluffy EPS cradling your precious head like a mint on a pillow.

Problem is, nobody wants a 2-foot-wide helmet, though it might come in handly if you were auditioning for a Jack in the Box commercial. So helmet designers have pared down the thickness of the foam, using denser, stiffer EPS to make up the difference. This increases the G-loading on your brain in a crash, of course. And the fine points of how many Gs a helmet transmits to the head, for how long, and in what kind of a crash, are the variables that make the helmet-standard debate so gosh darn fun.

Standardized Standards

The helmets are mounted on a 5-kilo (11 pound) magnesium headform and then dropped from a controlled height onto a variety of test anvils to simulate crash impacts on various surfaces and shapes. In the real world, your helmet actually hits flat pavement more than 85 percent of the time

To make buying a helmet in the U.S as confusing as possible, there are at least four standards a street motorcycle helmet can meet. The price of entry is the DOT standard, called FMVSS 218, that every street helmet sold here is legally required to pass. There is the European standard, called ECE 22-05, accepted by more than 50 countries. There’s the BSI 6658 Type A standard from Britain. And lastly the Snell M2000/M2005 standard, a voluntary, private standard used primarily in the U.S. So every helmet for street use here must meet the DOT standard, and might or might not meet one of the others.

Just by looking at the published requirements for each standard, you would guess a DOT-only helmet would be designed to be the softest, with an ECE helmet very close, then a BSI helmet, and then a Snell helmet.

Because there are few human volunteers for high-impact helmet testing—and because they would be a little confused after a hard day of 200-G impacts—it’s done on a test rig.

The helmets are dropped, using gravity to accelerate the helmet to a given speed before it smashes onto a test anvil bolted to the floor. By varying the drop height and the weight of the magnesium headform inside the helmet, the energy level of the test can be easily varied and precisely repeated. As the helmet/headform falls it is guided by either a steel track or a pair of steel cables. That guiding system adds friction to slow the fall slightly, so the test technician corrects for this by raising the initial drop height accordingly.

The headform has an accelerometer inside that precisely records the force the headform receives, showing how many Gs the headform took as it stopped and for how long.

If you test a bunch of helmets under the same conditions, you can get a good idea of how well each one absorbs a particular hit. And it’s important to understand that as in lap times, golf scores and marriages, a lower number is always better when we’re talking about your head receiving extreme G forces.

On The Highway To Snell

All the Snell/DOT helmets we examined use a dual-density foam liner. The upper cap of foam on this Scorpion liner is softer to compensate for the extra stiffness of the spherical upper shell area. Some manufacturers, including Arai and HJC, use a one-piece liner with two different densities molded together.

On the stiff, tough-guy side of this debate is the voluntary Snell M2000/M2005 standard, which dictates each helmet be able to withstand some tough, very high-energy impacts.

The Snell Memorial Foundation is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to “research, education, testing and development of helmet safety standards.”

If you think moving quickly over the surface of the planet is fun and you enjoy using your brain, you should be grateful to the Snell Memorial Foundation. The SMF has helped create standards that have raised the bar in head protection in nearly every pursuit in which humans hit their heads: bicycles, horse riding, harness racing, karting, mopeds, skateboards, rollerblades, recreational skiing, ski racing, ATV riding, snowboarding, car racing and, of course, motorcycling.

But as helmet technology has improved and accident research has accumulated, many head-injury experts feel the Snell M2000 and M2005 standards are, to quote Dr. Harry Hurt of Hurt Report fame, “a little bit excessive.”

The killer—the hardest Snell test for a motorcycle helmet to meet—is a two-strike test onto a hemispherical chunk of stainless steel about the size of an orange. The first hit is at an energy of 150 joules, which translates to dropping a 5-kilo weight about 10 feet—an extremely high-energy impact. The next hit, on the same spot, is set at 110 joules, or about an 8-foot drop. To pass, the helmet is not allowed to transmit more than 300 Gs to the headform in either hit.

Tough tests such as this have driven helmet development over the years. But do they have any practical application on the street, where a hit as hard as the hardest single Snell impact may only happen in 1 percent of actual accidents? And where an impact as severe as the two-drop hemi test happens just short of never?

Dr. Jim Newman, an actual rocket scientist and highly respected head-impact expert—he was once a Snell Foundation director—puts it this way: “If you want to create a realistic helmet standard, you don’t go bashing helmets onto hemispherical steel balls. And you certainly don’t do it twice.

“Over the last 30 years,” continues Newman, “we’ve come to the realization that people falling off motorcycles hardly ever, ever hit their head in the same place twice. So we have helmets that are designed to withstand two hits at the same site. But in doing so, we have severely, severely compromised their ability to take one hit and absorb energy properly.

“The consequence is, when you have one hit at one site in an accident situation, two things happen: One, you don’t fully utilize the energy-absorbing material that’s available. And two, you generate higher G loading on the head than you need to.

“What’s happened to Snell over the years is that in order to make what’s perceived as a better helmet, they kept raising the impact energy. What they should have been doing, in my view, is lowering the allowable G force.

“In my opinion, Snell should keep a 10-foot drop [in its testing]. But tell the manufacturers, ‘OK, 300 Gs is not going to cut it anymore. Next year you’re going to have to get down to 250. And the next year, 200. And the year after that, 185.'”

The Brand Leading The Brand

“The Snell sticker,” continued Newman, “has become a marketing gimmick. By spending 60 cents [paid to the Snell foundation], a manufacturer puts that sticker in his helmet and he can increase the price by $30 or $40. Or even $60 or $100.

“Because there’s this allure, this charisma, this image associated with a Snell sticker that says, ‘Hey, this is a better helmet, and therefore must be worth a whole lot more money.’ And in spite of the very best intentions of everybody at Snell, they did not have the field data [on actual accidents] that we have now [when they devised the standard]. And although that data has been around a long time, they have chosen, at this point, not to take it into consideration.”

A World Of Hurt

Dr. Hurt sees the Snell standard in pretty much the same light.

“What should the [G] limit on helmets be? Just as helmet designs should be rounder, smoother and safer, they should also be softer, softer, softer. Because people are wearing these so-called high-performance helmets and are getting diffused [brain] injuries … well, they’re screwed up for life. Taking 300 Gs is not a safe thing.

“We’ve got people that we’ve replicated helmet [impacts] on that took 250, 230 Gs [in their accidents]. And they’ve got a diffuse injury they’re not gonna get rid of. The helmet has a good whack on it, but so what? If they’d had a softer helmet they’d have been better off.”

How does the Snell Foundation respond to the criticism of head-injury scientists from all over the world that the Snell standards create helmets too stiff for optimum protection in the great majority of accidents?

“The whole business of testing helmets is based on the assumption that there is a threshold of injury,” says Ed Becker, executive director of the Snell Foundation. “And that impact shocks below that threshold are going to be non-injurious. “We’re going with 300 Gs because we started with 400 Gs back in the early days. And based on [George Snively’s, the founder of the SMF] testing, and information he’d gotten from the British Standards Institute, 400 Gs seemed reasonable back then. He revised it downward over the years, largely because helmet standards were for healthy young men that were driving race cars. But after motorcycling had taken up those same helmets, he figured that not everybody involved in motorcycling was going to be a young man. So he concluded from work that he had done that the threshold of injury was above 400 Gs. But certainly below 600 Gs.

“The basis for the 300 G [limit in the Snell M2000 standard] is that the foundation is conservative. [The directors] have not seen an indication that a [head injury] threshold is below 300 Gs. If and when they do, they’ll certainly take it into account.”

So nobody is being hurt by the added stiffness of a Snell helmet, we asked.

“That’s certainly our hope here,” answered Becker. “At this point I’ve got no reason to think anything else.”

European Style

The Snell Foundation may have no reason to think anything else. But every scientist we spoke to, as well as the government standards agencies of the United States and the 50 countries that accept the ECE 22.05 standard, see things quite differently.

The European Union recently released an extensive helmet study called COST 327, which involved close study of 253 recent motorcycle accidents in Germany, Finland and the U.K. This is how they summarized the state of the helmet art after analyzing the accidents and the damage done to the helmets and the people: “Current designs are too stiff and too resilient, and energy is absorbed efficiently only at values of HIC [Head Injury Criteria: a measure of G force over time] well above those which are survivable.”

As we said, it’s a lively debate.

If your brain is injured, swelling and inflammation often occur. Because there’s no extra room inside your skull, your brain tries to squeeze down through the hole in the base of the skull. This creates pressure that injures the vital brain stem even further, often destroying the parts that control breathing and other basic body functions. If you’re hit very violently on the jaw, as in a head-on impact, the force can be transmitted to the base of the skull, which can fracture and sever your spine. It’s a common cause of death in helmeted motorcycle riders—and a very good reason to wear a full-face helmet and insist on thick EPS padding—not resilient foam—in the helmet’s chin bar. When your brain collides with the inside of your skull, bony protrusions around your eyes, sinuses and other areas can cause severe damage to the brain. And if your head is twisted rapidly, the brain can lag behind, causing tearing and serious internal brain injury as it drags against the skull. A helmet is the best way to avoid such unpleasantries.

Doctors and head-injury researchers use a simplified rating of injuries, called the Abbreviated Injury Scale, or AIS, to describe how severely a patient is hurt when they come into a trauma facility. AIS 1 means you’ve been barely injured. AIS 6 means you’re dead, or sure to be dead very soon. Here’s the entire AIS scale:

    = Minor

    = Moderate

    = Serious

    = Severe

    = Critical

    = Unsurvivable

A patient’s AIS score is determined separately for each different section of the body. So you could have an AIS 4 injury to your leg, an AIS 3 to your chest and an AIS 5 injury to your head. And you’d be one hurtin’ puppy. Newman is quoted in the COST study on the impact levels likely to cause certain levels of injury. Back in the ’80s he stated that, as a rough guideline, a peak linear impact—the kind we’re measuring here—of 200 to 250 Gs generally corresponds to a head injury of AIS 4, or severe; that a 250 G to 300 G impact corresponds to AIS 5, or critical; and that anything over 300 Gs corresponds to AIS 6. That is, unsurvivable.

Newman isn’t the only scientist who thinks getting hit with much more than 200 Gs is a bad idea. In fact, researchers have pretty much agreed on that for 50 years.

The Wayne State Tolerance Curve is the result of a pretty gruesome series of experiments back in the ’50s and ’60s in which dogs’ brains were blasted with bursts of compressed air, monkeys were bashed on the skull, and the heads of dead people were dropped to see just how hard they could be hit before big-time injury set in. This study’s results were backed up by the JARI Human Head Impact Tolerance Curve, published in ’80 by a Japanese group who did further unspeakable things to monkeys, among other medically necessary atrocities.

The two tolerance curves agree on how many Gs you can apply to a human head for how long before a concussion or other more serious brain injury occurs. And the Wayne State Tolerance Curve was instrumental in creating the DOT helmet standard, with its relatively low G-force allowance.

According to both these curves, exposing a human head to a force over 200 Gs for more than 2 milliseconds is what medical experts refer to as “bad.” Heads are different, of course. Young, strong people can take more Gs than old, weak people. Some prizefighters can take huge hits again and again and not seem to suffer any ill effects other than a tendency to sell hamburger cookers on late-night TV. And the impacts a particular head has undergone in the past may make that head more susceptible to injury.

Is an impact over the theoretical 200 G/2 millisecond threshold going to kill you? Probably not. Is it going to hurt you? Depends on you, and how much over that threshold your particular hit happens to be. But head injuries short of death are no joke. Five million Americans suffer from disabilities from what’s called Traumatic Brain Injury—getting hit too hard on the head. That’s disabilities, meaning they ain’t the same as they used to be.

There’s another important factor that comes into play when discussing how hard a hit you should allow your brain to take: the other injuries you’ll probably get in a serious crash, and how the effects of your injuries add up.

The likelihood of dying from a head injury goes up dramatically if you have other major injuries as well. It also goes up with age. Which means that a nice, easy AIS 3 head injury, which might be perfectly survivable on its own, can be the injury that kills you if you already have other major injuries. Which, as it happens, you are very likely to have in a serious motorcycle crash.

The COST study was limited to people who had hit their helmets on the pavement in their accidents. Of these, 67 percent sustained some kind of head injury. Even more? percent—sustained leg injuries, and 57 percent had thorax injuries. You can even calculate your odds using the Injury Severity Score, or ISS. Take the AIS scores for the worst three injuries you have. Square each of those scores—that is, multiply them by themselves. Add the three results and compare them with the ISS Scale of Doom below.

A score of 75 means you’re dead. Sorry. Very few people with an ISS of 70 see tomorrow either.

If you’re between 15 and 44 years old, an ISS score of 40 means you have a 50-50 chance of making it. If you’re between 45 and 64 years old, ISS 29 is the 50-50 mark. And above 65 years old, the 50-50 level is an ISS of 20. For a 45- to 64-year old guy such as myself, an ISS over 29 means I’ll probably die.

If I get two “serious,” AIS 3 injuries—the aforementioned AIS 3 head hit and AIS 3 chest thump—and a “severe” AIS 4 leg injury, my ISS score is … let’s see, 3 times 3 is 9. Twice that is 18. 4 times 4 is 16. 18 and 16 is 34. Ooops. Gotta go.

Drop my AIS 3 head injury to an AIS 2 and my ISS score is 29. Now I’ve got a 50-50 shot.

Obviously, this means it’s very important to keep the level of head injury as low as possible. Because even if the head injury itself is survivable on its own, sustaining a more severe injury—even between relatively low injury levels—may not just mean a longer hospital stay, it may be the ticket that transfers you from your warm, cushy bed in the trauma unit to that cold, sliding slab downstairs.

Department Of Testing

In the other corner of the U.S. helmet cage-fighting octagon is the DOT standard. It mandates a testing regimen of moderate-energy impacts, which happen in 90 percent or more of actual accidents, according to the Hurt Report and other, more recent studies.

Where the Snell standard limits peak linear acceleration to 300 G, the DOT effectively limits peak Gs to 250. Softer impacts, lower G tolerance. In short, a kinder, gentler standard.

The DOT standard has acquired something of a low-rent reputation for a number of reasons. First, it comes from the Gubmint, and the Gubmint, as we know, can’t do anything right.

The DOT standard, like laws against, say, murder, also relies on the honor system; that is, there’s only a penalty involved if you break it and sell a non-complying helmet and get caught. Manufacturers are required to do their own testing and then certify that their helmets meet the standards. But it also gives helmet designers quite a bit of freedom to design a helmet the way they think it ought to be for optimum overall protection. The question is, how well are those designers doing their job with all that freedom?

DOT, ECE BSI, SMF—Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off

In a typical large motorcycle dealership you’re likely to find helmets that conform to all these standards. Most U.S.-market full-face helmets made in Asia—Arai, HJC, Icon, KBC, ScorpionExo, Shoei, and most Fulmer models—are Snell M2000 or M2005 certified. (The Snell standard did not change substantially from M2000 to M2005.) Most helmets from European companies—Vemar, Shark, Schuberth, etc.—conform to the ECE 22-05 standard.

Suomy helmets sold under its own name conform to either the ECE or the BSI standard, but Suomy private-labels some helmets to brands such as Ducati that are built and certified to Snell. Some AGV models sold here are made to Snell standards, some to BSI. And a few Asian-made helmets are DOT-only. Among major manufacturers, Z1R (a subbrand of Parts Unlimited) and Fulmer Helmets sell DOT-only lids at the lower end of their pricing scales. You can also get ’em at Pep Boys under the Raider brand name.

Hurts So Good

To talk about helmet design and performance with any measure of authority, we should first look at the kinds of accidents that actually occur. The Hurt Report, issued in ’81, was the first, last and only serious study on real motorcycle accidents in the U.S. The study was done by some very smart, very reputable scientists and researchers at the University of Southern California. The Hurt researchers came to some surprising and illuminating conclusions—conclusions that have not been seriously challenged since.

First, about half of all serious motorcycle accidents happen when a car pulls in front of a bike in traffic. These accidents typically happen at very low speeds, with a typical impact velocity, after all the braking and skidding, below 25 mph. This was first revealed in the Hurt Report but has been recently backed up by two other studies, a similar one in Thailand and especially the COST 327 study done in the European Union, where people have fast bikes and like to ride very quickly on some roads with no speed limits at all.

Actual crash speeds are slow, but the damage isn’t. These are serious, often fatal crashes. Most of these crashes happen very close to home. Because no matter where you go, you always leave your own neighborhood and come back to it. And making it through traffic-filled intersections—the ones near your home—is the most dangerous thing you do on a street motorcycle.

The next-biggest group of typical accidents happens at night, often on a weekend, at higher speeds. They are much more likely to involve alcohol, and often take place when a rider goes off the road alone. These two groups of accidents account for almost 75 percent of all serious crashes. So the accident we are most afraid of, and the one we tend to buy our helmets for—crashing at high speeds, out sport riding—is relatively rare.

Even though many motorcycles were capable of running the quarter-mile in 11 seconds (or less) and topping 140 mph back in ’81, not one of the 900-odd accidents investigated in the Hurt study involved a speed over 100 mph. The “one in a thousand” speed seen in the Hurt Report was 86 mph, meaning only one of the accidents seen in the 900-crash study occurred at or above that speed. And the COST 327 study, done recently in the land of the autobahn, contained very few crashes over 120 kph, or 75 mph. The big lesson here is this: It’s a mistake to assume that going really fast causes a significant number of accidents just because a motorcycle can go really fast.

Another eye-opener: In spite of what one might assume, the speed at which an accident starts does not necessarily correlate to the impact the head—or helmet—will have to absorb in a crash. That is, according to the Hurt Report and the similar Thailand study, going faster when you fall off does not typically result in your helmet taking a harder hit.

How can this be? Because the vast majority of head impacts occur when the rider falls off his bike and simply hits his head on the flat road surface. The biggest impact in a given crash will typically happen on that first contact, and the energy is proportional to the height from which the rider falls—not his forward speed at the time. A big highside may give a rider some extra altitude, but rarely higher than 8 feet. A high-speed crash may involve a lot of sliding along the ground, but this is not particularly challenging to a helmeted head because all modern full-face helmets do an excellent job of protecting you from abrasion.

In fact, the vast majority of crashed helmets examined in the Hurt Report showed that they had absorbed about the same impact you’d receive if you simply tipped over while standing, like a bowling pin, and hit your head on the pavement. Ninety-plus percent of the head impacts surveyed, in fact, were equal to or less than the force involved in a 7-foot drop. And 99 percent of the impacts were at or below the energy of a 10-foot drop.

To Snell? Or Not To Snell?

In analyzing the accident-involved helmets, the Hurt researchers also addressed whether helmets certified to different standards actually performed differently in real crashes; that is, did a Snell-certified helmet work better at protecting a person in the real world than a plain old DOT-certified or equivalent helmet? The answer was no. In real street conditions, the DOT or equivalent helmets worked just as well as the Snell-certified helmets.

In the case of fatal accidents, there was one more important discovery in the Hurt Report: There were essentially no deaths to helmeted riders from head injuries alone.

Some people in the study, those involved in truly awful, bone-crushing, aorta-popping crashes, did sustain potentially fatal head injuries even though they were wearing helmets. The problem was that they also had, on average, three other injuries that would have killed them if the head injury hadn’t.

In other words, a crash violent enough to overwhelm any decent helmet will usually destroy the rest of the body as well. Newman put this into perspective. “In most cases, bottoming [compressing a helmet’s EPS completely] is not going to occur except in really violent accidents. And in these kind of cases, one might legitimately wonder whether there is anything you could do.”

How many people were saved because their helmet was designed to a “higher” or “higher energy” standard than the DOT standard? As far as the Hurt researchers could ascertain, none.

But the Hurt Report was done nearly 25 years ago. There have been a couple of significant accident studies done since. Both of which, by our reading, tend to back up the Hurt Report’s findings.

The COST 327 study investigated 253 motorcycle accidents in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom, from ’95-’98. Of these, the investigators selected 20 well-documented crashes and replicated the impact from those crashes by doing drop tests on identical helmets in the lab until they got the same helmet damage. This allowed them to find out how hard the helmet in the accident had been hit, and to correlate the impact with the injuries actually suffered by the rider or passenger. The COST 327 results showed that some very serious and potentially fatal head injuries can occur at impact levels that stiffer current helmet standards—such as Snell M2000 and M2005—allow helmets to exceed.

And remember, these guys are investigating crashes in Europe, where Snell-rated helmets are a rarity because they can’t generally pass the softer ECE standard required there.

In other words, the latest relevant study, which used state-of-the-art methods and covered accidents in countries where there are plenty of 10-second, 160-mph superbikes running around, concluded that current standards—even the relatively soft ECE standards—are allowing riders’ heads to be routinely subjected to forces that can severely injure or kill them. The COST study estimated that better, more energy-absorbent helmets could reduce motorcycle fatalities up to 20 percent. If that estimate is legitimate and was applied in the U.S., it would mean saving about 700 American riders’ lives a year.

There’s no good reason to think things are different here in the States than in Germany, Britain and Finland, all modern, well-developed, superbike-rich countries. Heads are heads, asphalt is asphalt, and falling bodies operate under the same laws of physics there as they do here in America.

If you ask most head-impact scientists or the representatives of the European helmet manufacturers how they like the Snell M2000/M2005 standard, they will generally tell you it’s unrealistic, based more on supposition than on science, and forces manufacturers to make helmets that are stiffer than they should be.

If you ask the representatives of many of the top Snell-approved helmet companies, they’ll say the Snell standard is a wonderful thing, and they’ll imply helmets certified to lower-energy standards—that would be any other standard in the world—are suspicious objects, like smoked clams from the 99 Cents Only store. And not as good at protecting you in an extremely high-energy mega-crash as a Snell-approved helmet is.

What the Snell advocates won’t tell you is that when these same makers sell their helmets in Europe, Japan and the U.K., they are not the same helmets they sell here, and they’re not Snell rated. They are built softer, tailored to conform to exactly the same ECE or BSI standards as the European makers.

If you get these two groups of folks in a room together and ask these questions, we’d suggest wearing a helmet yourself.

Can Less Be More?

In the last 10 to 15 years a number of Asian-made helmet brands such as HJC, Icon, KBC and Scorpion have entered the market to challenge the once-reigning Japanese leaders, Shoei and Arai.

These new brands offer helmets that look and feel pretty much like the Arais and Shoeis we were used to wearing and seeing on all the magazine covers, but at substantially lower prices. Problem is, a lower price, especially in a potentially life-saving piece of safety equipment, can do as much harm as good to a brand. There’s always the perception lingering in a buyer’s mind that a product can’t be as good or protect as well if it doesn’t cost as much.

So what can a lower-priced maker do to enhance its brand reputation? Get Snell certified. Whether they think a Snell helmet is actually better at head protection or not—and there’s no shortage of debate on that subject—they’re essentially over a barrel. If they don’t get Snell certified, they give the perception their products are not as good as the others on the shelf. And their helmets will sell like Girls Gone Wild videos at a Village People concert.

In six months of researching this article, I spoke to many helmet company representatives. Some in civil tones. Some not so much. One, in particular, summed up the Snell-or-not quandary best. It was Phil Davy, brand manager for the very popular Icon helmets and riding gear. “When you build a helmet for this market, meeting the Snell standard is your first, second, third, fourth and fifth concern. You can then start designing a helmet that’s safe,” he said.

It is important to note that every one of Davy’s Icon helmets is Snell certified. He’s no fool.

AVERAGE Gs

Fewer Gs = Less chance of brain injury

DOT-only helmets:

Z1R ZRP-1 (P)

Average: 152 Gs

LF: 148 gs

RF: 176 gs

LR: 153 gs

RR: 130 gs

Fulmer AFD4 (P)

Average: 157 Gs

LF: 152 gs

RF: 173 gs

LR: 175 gs

RR: 130 gs

Pep Boys Raider (P)

Average: 174 Gs

LF: 163 gs

RF: 199 gs

LR: 185 gs

RR: 152 gs

BSI/DOT Helmets

AGV Ti-Tech (F)

Average: 169 Gs

LF: 156 gs

RF: 199 gs

LR: 195 gs

RR: 129 gs

Suomy Spec 1R (BSI) (F)

Average: 182 Gs

LF: 192 gs

RF: 215 gs

LR: 197 gs

RR: 126 gs

ECE 22-05/DOT Helmets

Schuberth S-1 (F)

Average: 161 Gs

LF: 151 gs

RF: 180 gs

LR: 176 gs

RR: 137 gs

Suomy Spec 1R (ECE) (F)

Average: 171 Gs

LF: 156 gs

RF: 200 gs

LR: 190 gs

RR: 140 gs

Shark RSX (F)

Average: 173 Gs

LF: 166 gs

RF: 187 gs

LR: 201 gs

RR: 141 gs

Vemar VSR

Average: 174 Gs

LF: 171 gs

RF: 198 gs

LR: 166 gs

RR: 162 gs

Snell 2000/DOT Helmets

Icon Mainframe (P)

Average: 181 Gs

LF: 168 gs

RF: 217 gs

LR: 189 gs

RR: 152 gs

Icon Alliance (F)

Average: 183 Gs

LF: 179 gs

RF: 200 gs

LR: 179 gs

RR: 175 gs

Scorpion EXO-400 (P)

Average: 187 Gs

LF: 185 gs

RF: 212 gs

LR: 193 gs

RR: 158 gs

AGV X-R2 (F)

Average: 188 Gs

LF: 192 gs

RF: 226 gs

LR: 166 gs

RR: 167 gs

Arai Tracker GT (F)

Average: 201 Gs

LF: 193 gs

RF: 243 gs

LR: 203 gs

RR: 166 gs

HJC AC-11 (F)

Average: 204 Gs

LF: 195 gs

RF: 230 gs

LR: 231 gs

RR: 163 gs

Scorpion EXO-700 (F)

Average: 211 Gs

LF: 207 gs

RF: 236 gs

LR: 226 gs

RR: 176 gs

Impact Key: LF: Left Front, 7-foot drop, Flat Pavement. RF: Right Front, 10-foot drop, Flat Pavement. LR: Left Rear, 7-foot drop, Flat Pavement. RR: Right Rear, 7-foot drop, Edge Anvil. Shell Key: (P): Polycarbonate (F): Fiberglass

The Rules Rule

OK. We promised an actual helmet impact test, and it’s time to give it to you.

We asked the major helmet brands sold in the U.S. to each pick one model of their helmets. We asked for two functionally identical helmets in the same size, medium or 7¼. Why two? To give us a look at the consistency of the manufacturer’s production techniques. Why all one size? To make sure any differences we saw were due to design and production differences, not random differences due to sizing. And we wanted to use the same-size headform in all our testing, again for consistency. We were also interested in learning as much as we could about different helmet constructions, and about how helmets built to different standards vary. So if a manufacturer made both fiberglass-shell and plastic-shell helmets, we asked for a pair of each. And if a manufacturer made helmets to two different standards, we asked for both as well.

Icon and Scorpion sent both fiberglass and polycarbonate helmets, all Snell/DOT-rated. AGV sent a pair of Snell/DOT-rated X-R2s and a pair of BSI/DOT-rated TiTechs. And Suomy sent the same model, its Spec 1R, in both BSI-rated and ECE-rated versions.

In the end, we wound up with 16 models, 32 helmets in all. A look at the accompanying chart will give you a rundown of the helmet brands that elected to participate and the models they sent. A number of manufacturers chose not to participate: Bell, KBC, OGK, Shoei and Simpson were contacted repeatedly, but chose not to send helmets. We also tested a couple of full-face Raider helmets purchased from Pep Boys for $69.95 a pop.

Unlike other standards testing, where the test parameters are published years ahead of time, we did not reveal the actual tests we were going to perform before we did the testing. So there was, essentially, no chance for them to send mislabeled, ringer helmets.

We needed somebody to help us design the tests and do the actual testing. So we hired David Thom. Remember the Hurt Report? Thom was one of the USC researchers who went out to investigate all those motorcycle accidents and then helped pull it all together. Thom worked at USC with Professor Harry Hurt for many years, investigating all the various ways motorcyclists and other folk hurt themselves, and striving mightily to find better ways to protect them.

Thom subsequently formed his own company, Collision and Injury Dynamics. He has his own state-of-the-art helmet impact lab where he does impartial, objective certification testing for many helmet companies. The DOT standard, for instance, relies on companies certifying their own helmets, and Thom is one of the people they contract with to do the actual testing. In other words, he knows what he’s doing.

We had no interest in checking to see whether our helmets conform to any specific standard. Because a helmet’s job is protecting your head, not passing a standard. We came up with our own battery of tests designed to duplicate, as best we could, the impacts that really happen on a statistically significant basis.

Real motorcycle accidents don’t end with a helmet hitting a machined stainless-steel anvil—they end up with a helmet bashing down on good old lumpy, gravel-studded asphalt. So the industrious Thom grabbed a square-foot piece of Sheldon Street in El Segundo, California, the street out in front of his lab, when the paving crew tore it up for resurfacing. Set in concrete, that would be our “anvil,” as they say in the biz, for flat-surface impacts.

Three of the four impacts we planned for each helmet would be on that flat asphalt surface—simply because that’s what real motorcyclists land on when they fall, more than 75 percent of the time. The Hurt Report established this, and in the recent Thailand helmet study 87.4 percent of the helmet hits were from the road surface or the shoulder. Helmets do hit curbs a small percentage of the time, but usually after sliding along on the road first, which means that in most cases they are actually hitting a flat surface—the vertical plane of the curb.

For the energy of each drop, we selected a range of hits typical of both the DOT and Snell testing regimens. We hit the left front and the left rear of the helmets with an energy of 100 joules, which translates to a drop of about 2 meters, or 6.6 feet. According to the Hurt Report, this drop represents the 90th-percentile energy of the crashes they investigated. We also did one high-energy drop with an energy of 150 joules, the same energy—about a 10-foot drop—as the hardest hit specified in the Snell standards, on the right front of each helmet. That’s 66 percent more violent than the drop specified by the DOT standard for a medium-sized helmet, and represents the 99th-percentile impact seen in the Hurt Report. Which means 1 percent or fewer impacts seen on the street exceeded this energy level. So we weren’t exactly taking it easy.

To see what happens when you’re unlucky enough to rear-end a truck’s lift gate, slide into a storm drain or be flung into the Eiffel Tower, we also did an edge hit onto a scary-looking piece of upright steel bar. We debated whether to do this hit at a 2-meter, 100-joule energy level or a more violent 3-meter, 150-joule impact level. We opted for the smaller hit, more to protect the helmet test rig than to play nice with the helmets. If a single helmet bottoms out and squishes its EPS liner flat, the total impact goes right into the headform and test rig—as it would to your head. And just like your head, the test rig is gonna break. We weren’t sure all the helmets would survive the 150-joule edge drop, so we pulled back to the 100-joule level. Fracturing the rig would put us out of commission for days, and we didn’t have the time—or money—to risk that.

In the end we were too conservative. When we inspected the helmets after the full course of testing, the 100-joule edge hit hadn’t come close to bottoming any of the helmets—even the supposedly wimpy DOT-only ones. We are confident we could have done the edge test at the 99th-percentile 150 joules—the Snell edge-anvil test—and seen results commensurate with those we saw from the other impacts.

The results of all our laborious impact testing were exactly as expected—but still surprising as hell.

The helmets ranged from the softest regimen, the DOT standard, to the Snell standard, the stiffest. But would the real-world, production-spec helmets actually show that progression from soft to stiff? In other words, can you predict how stiff a helmet will be simply by looking at the standard label? Absolutely.

In fact, our results show that modern helmets are all made with an amazing degree of precision, with their shell construction, liner density and liner thickness all controlled very well in the production process. In other words, almost everybody designing serious helmets seems to know exactly how to get what they want—the only variable is deciding what they want. And for the most part, the standards make that decision for them, not flashes of genius on the parts of the helmet designers themselves.

All the helmets we tested performed exactly as the standards they were designed to meet predicted. And they seemed to exceed those standards—that is, the DOT-only helmets were better at high-energy impacts than they had to be just to pass the DOT standard, and the Snell helmets were better at absorbing low-energy impacts than they had to be to pass DOT or Snell. So choosing a helmet, at least in terms of safety, is not a question of choosing high or low quality, it’s one of choosing what degree of stiffness you prefer, finding a helmet in that range by choosing a particular standard, and then worrying about fine points like fit, comfort, ventilation, graphics, racer endorsements or computer-generated spokesmodels.

How Hard Is Hard?

Not one helmet came close to bottoming in any of our tests. And they all handled the low-energy impacts, even the scary-looking edge impact, without strain.

In fact, in most cases the peak Gs in the edge impact were lower than the flat-anvil peak Gs for the same helmet at the same impact energy. Why is this? Because the edge impact flexes and/or delaminates the helmet shell sooner in the impact, letting the EPS inside—the real energy absorber in the system—start doing its work sooner.

In the high-energy impact, the 3-meter, 150-joule drop—the kind of hit a Snell helmet is, presumably, designed to withstand—the differences became more apparent.

The stiffest helmets in the Big Drop test, the Arai Tracker GTs, hit our hypothetical head with an average of 243 peak Gs. The softest helmets, the Z1R ZRP-1s, bonked the noggin with an average of 176 peak Gs. This is a classic comparison of a stiff, fiberglass, Snell-rated helmet, the Arai, against a softer, polycarbonate-shell, DOT-only helmet, the Z1R. OK. So let’s agree that we want to subject our heads to the minimum possible G force. Should we pick an impressive, expensive fiberglass/Kevlar/unobtanium-fiber helmet—or one of those less-expensive plastic-shelled helmets?

Conventional helmet-biz wisdom says fiberglass construction is somehow better at absorbing energy than plastic—something about the energy of the crash being used up in delaminating the shell. And that a stiffer shell lets a designer use softer foam inside—which might absorb energy better.

Our results showed the exact opposite—that plastic-shelled helmets actually performed better than fiberglass. In our big 3-meter hit—the high-energy kind of bash one might expect would show the supposed weaknesses of a plastic shell—the plastic helmets transferred an average of 20 fewer Gs compared with their fiberglass brothers, which were presumably designed by the same engineers to meet the same standards, and built in the same factories by the same people.

Why is this? We’re guessing—but it’s a really good guess: The EPS liner inside the shell is better at absorbing energy than the shell. The polycarbonate shells flex rather than crush and delaminate, and this flexing, far from being a problem, actually lets the EPS do more of its job of energy absorption while transferring less energy to the head.

Remember, these polycarbonate helmets from both Icon and Scorpion are also Snell M2000 rated. So they are tested to some very extreme energy levels. And Ed Becker, executive director of the Snell Foundation, is on record as saying that a low-priced—that is, plastic-shelled—Snell-certified helmet is just as good at protecting your head as a high-priced—that is, fiberglass—Snell-certified helmet. So at the high end of impact energy, we have the Snell Foundation vouching for their performance. And our testing, without the extreme two-hit hemi test, says they’re actually superior.

Score One For Faceless Government Bureaucrats

The DOT helmets we had were all plastic-shelled, and none cost more than $100. How did they do? They kicked butt. In what must be considered a head-impact Cinderella story, the DOT-only helmets from Z1R delivered less average G force to the headform through all the impacts than any others in the test.

And they still excelled in the big-hit, 150-joule impact—a blast 66 percent harder than any actual DOT test for a medium-sized helmet.

The Z1R ZRP-1s continuously amazed us. After all the testing, its outer shell looked essentially unharmed: The slight road rash at the impact sites caused by our stubborn insistence on hitting actual pavement looked no worse than we’d expect if the helmet had fallen off the seat at a rest stop.

When we pulled the ZRP-1s apart, the EPS had cracked and compressed at the impact sites, just as it’s supposed to do, and just as it did in every other helmet. But it had come nowhere near bottoming; there was still an inch or more of impact-absorbing foam left. And the plastic shell seemed completely unharmed, from the inside as well as the outside, even where it had taken the terrifying edge hit and the big three-meter bash.

This illustrates just how hard it is to tell from the outside whether a helmet has taken a severe hit. And why you should never, ever buy a used helmet.

Fiberglass helmets such as the the Arai Tracker (shown) showed substantial damage to their shells after the edge impact. The polycarbonate-shell helmets were largely unmarked. Neither result is essentially better: Either shell material can be used to make excellent helmets. Polycarbonate helmets generally transmit fewer Gs to the head in our testing than fiberglass-shell lids, even when certified to the same standards.

The Hardest Hits

So the softest DOT helmets came through our tests with protection to spare. But doubt lingered, in spite of everything we had seen: How would they do in a monster, wicked-big impact?

So we decided to kill them. We ran the Z1Rs up the test rig one last time. Not just to the 10-foot, 150-joule Snell test height, but all the way to the top of the rig: 3.9 meters, or 13 feet. This hit would be at 8.5 meters per second, an energy of 185 joules. That’s higher and harder than any existing helmet standard impact. And, not coincidentally, the same height and energy called out in the COST 327 proposed standard, the one that may replace the current ECE 22-05 specification. We did one hit on the pavement and one on the curb anvil—the same hits called out in the COST proposal. We did them on the back of the helmets, in the center, because that was the only place we hadn’t hit them before.

So this last test is not directly comparable to the others. But it showed, in no uncertain terms, just how tough—and how protective—an inexpensive helmet can be.

The peak Gs for the monster hits were 208 for the curb impact and 209 for the flat-pavement impact. Just a few Gs more, that is, than many of the Snell-rated helmets transmitted in their seven-foot hits on the flat anvil. And even after these mega hits, the EPS liners were still nowhere near used up.

The ZRP-1s are also well finished, quiet and very comfortable, though maybe a little short on venting. They’re also light: Our ZRP-1s weighed only about an ounce more than the lightest helmets in the test, the Arai Tracker GTs. What’s the cost for all this excellent impact absorption, comfort, light weight and highly durable finish? In a solid color, a ZRP-1 retails for $79.95.

The least-expensive helmets in the test, the $69.95 Pep Boys Raiders, also did well in all the standard impacts. But we can’t recommend them because their chin bars have soft, resilient foam, not the EPS you need to absorb a severe head-on impact. Our advice is to spring for the extra $10 and treat yourself to a Z1R ZRP-1.

Another helmet that taught us a thing or two was the Schuberth S-1. The Schuberth is certified to the ECE 22-05 standard, which dictates impact energies marginally higher than the DOT standard. Like the Z1R ZRP-1 and the Fulmer AFD4, it has relatively large outer dimensions, leaving room in the shell for thicker, and presumably softer, EPS. And like the DOT-only lids, it soaked up energy like a sailor soaks up Schlitz. If you can’t bring yourself to wear a $79.95 helmet just to get excellent energy management, you’ll feel very comfortable with the Schuberth, which sells for $640 to $700.

The other helmets we pulled apart used either a one-piece or a two-piece EPS liner. The S-1, on the other hand, uses a complex, five-piece liner, with separate front, rear and overear pads glued to a central foam hat. Leave it to the Germans to use five parts to do what the Z1R does with one.

A few of the European helmets—the Vemars, the Sharks and the Suomys—use a different kind of EPS liner than we’re used to seeing in Asian-built helmets. Instead of a solid foam liner of a specific density, these Euro-lids use stiffer, more rigid foam with deep channels in it to soften up the assembly and vent air through the shell. The effect is that of a highly vented bicycle helmet stuffed into the requisite hard outer shell. The ECE-rated Vemars and Sharks and the ECE and BSI-rated Suomys performed well on the impact torture rack, showing generally lower G-transmission than we saw in typical Snell-rated helmets.

helmet layers

The Human Race

“But I’m a racer,” we hear you rationalizing. “I go really fast. I go so fast, in fact, that I need a very special, high-energy helmet to protect my wonderful manliness and fastness.” Not so, Rossi-breath.

If you’re going to land on flat pavement when you crash—and you almost always do—you can afford to wear a softer ECE or DOT helmet, because softer helmets do a very good job of absorbing big impacts—even really, really big impacts—on flat surfaces. Remember, the hard part about getting a helmet past the Snell standard involves surviving that mythical steel orange very hard twice in the same spot on the helmet, simulating a monster hit—or two—on, say, a car bumper. Been to Laguna Seca recently? No car bumpers or steel oranges anywhere.

Racers don’t typically hit truck parts, storm drains, sign posts, tree shredders or the Watts Towers. They fall off, sometimes tumble, and almost always hit the racetrack. Or maybe an air fence, a sand trap or hay bale. In other words, the racetrack is the best-controlled, best-engineered, softest, flattest environment you’re going to find. Racers are even more likely to hit flat pavement than street riders—and street riders hit flat pavement around 90 percent of the time.

The AMA accepts DOT, ECE 22-05, BSI 6658 Type A or Snell M2000-rated helmets. That’s for going 200 mph on a superbike at Daytona. The FIM, which sanctions MotoGP races all over the world, accepts any of the above standards but DOT. Why not DOT if DOT helmets are comparable to ECE helmets? Because the DOT is an American institution, and the FIM doesn’t really do American. And because the DOT standard doesn’t require any outside testing—just the manufacturers’ word that their helmets pass.

Yes, Size Does Matter

There’s one more issue with the Snell and BSI standards we should mention, even if we didn’t specifically address it in our testing.

Snell and BSI dictate that every helmet be impact-tested with the same-weight headform inside, no matter the size of the helmet. That is, an XS helmet is required to withstand exactly the same total impact energy as an XXL.

The DOT and ECE standards vary the energy of the impacts by varying the weight of the headform, under the reasonable rationale that a very small head weighs less than a very big one. In the eyes of the governments of both the U.S. and the European community, in other words, helmet makers should tailor the stiffness of their helmets to suit the head sizes of the wearers to protect everybody’s brain equally.

What does this mean to you? If you have a relatively heavy head, the difference in stiffness between a Snell helmet and a DOT or ECE helmet will be relatively small. If you are a man, woman or child with a lighter head, on the other hand, the difference in stiffness between a Snell helmet and a DOT or ECE helmet will be relatively huge.

So if you are concerned after reading all this that a Snell helmet might be too stiff for you, Mr. XXL, you should be even more concerned about putting your XS wife or child into a Snell or BSI helmet. The Snell Foundation’s position on this is that they have no proof big heads weigh more than small heads. Hmmm. Isn’t a head basically a shell of thin bone filled with water? Doesn’t more bone and water weigh more than less bone and water?

And it’s not just us. One study by Mr. Thom concluded that head weight does increase with head circumference. He found there is good evidence that smaller heads weigh less and that smaller helmets should thus be softer.

As Thom says regarding the Snell Foundation’s position on this: “They are not in touch with reality.”

All Helmets Are Great. We Investigate.

The good news in all this is that helmets—all helmets—are getting better. The last time we did an impact test on helmets was back in ’91, in the November issue if you’re rummaging through that pile in the garage next to your 1929 Scott Flying Squirrel.

We did some of the same impacts this time, a 7-foot flat drop and a 10-foot flat drop, as we (and Thom) did in ’91. So the results, at least on those tests, are highly comparable.

Back in ’91, both DOT and Snell/DOT helmets routinely exceeded 250 Gs in the 7-foot drop, and often spiked past 300 Gs in the 10-foot drop. Ouch.

In our new results, no helmet exceeded 250 Gs in the 10-foot drop, and the vast majority of the 7-foot drops stayed well below 200 Gs. So falling at a 10-foot energy level today—a 99th-percentile crash—is like falling at a 7-foot energy level was back in ’91. That means more and more people are being protected better and better. It also means that in well over 90 percent of the impacts we did, the rider would probably have come out with no more than an AIS 3—or serious—brain injury.

Helmets are getting better, and some of the least-expensive helmets provide truly amazing protection. But just how good can helmets get? Stay tuned—we’ll explore that topic very soon.

Lane-keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring, steering assistance, automatic braking and more features already are available on cars and trucks being sold in the United States. And some of these features no doubt will help reduce the number of crashes, injuries and fatalities as vehicles become better able to communicate with each other, with smart roadways and with their drivers.

While experts say it will be years before many of these features saturate the market and even longer before fully self-driving cars are common on our roads, experimental vehicles are already on public roads for testing and pilot projects.

General Motors, Waymo, Tesla, Uber and other companies have put driverless cars on the roads of communities around the country.

In Columbus, Ohio, driverless electric shuttles, called Smart Circuit, are providing free rides to the public along a 1.5-mile route with stops at museums, a visitor center and a park. Each vehicle has an operator educating and assisting passengers, but who can also seize control of the vehicle.

The Kroger grocery chain is using unmanned autonomous vehicles to deliver groceries in Scottsdale, Ariz., in partnership with Nuro, a self-driving service.

The first commercial self-driving vehicles in New York are expected to begin operating in the Brooklyn Navy Yard this spring.

Yet there is no guarantee that any of them can detect motorcyclists and react properly to their presence.

“As the technological advances accelerate, little has changed from the regulatory perspective since the release of U.S. Department of Transportation’s Automated Vehicle 3.0, issued in October,” said Mike Sayre, AMA government relations manager for on-highway issues. “The federal government continues to rely on its Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment, which allows companies developing self-driving cars to decide whether their vehicles are safe.

“The idea of AV developers self-certifying many aspects of the safety of their vehicles, and the standards that they would be holding themselves to being totally voluntary and based on industry consensus, doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence,” Sayre said.

The National Transportation Safety Board issued a report in September acknowledging that motorcycles are not being considered in the development of crash-prevention technology, which is the basis for most automated-vehicle technology. The NTSB recommended that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration work toward addressing this in vehicles and in smart infrastructure, as well.

Well-publicized incidents in which AVs were involved in crashes—some fatal—point to flaws in the software and in the drivers’ overreliance on it.

Consumer choices

Driver-assist technology holds the potential to make the roadways safer for all motorists and motorcyclists.

For example, left-turn warning systems could alert drivers to an oncoming motorcyclist, reducing the frequency of one of the most prevalent types of motorcycle-vehicle crashes.

At the Lifesavers National Conference on Highway Safety Priorities in April, Kenneth Bragg of the NTSB and others said that crash-prevention technology is poorly explained to consumers, who either do not understand the features’ capabilities or abuse them, if they do.

“This leads to complacency and higher risk when the drivers need to take over operation of the vehicle,” Sayre said. “If a car is great at stopping for a another stopped car that is totally in line with it, a driver may pay less attention when the car fails to stop as well for a turning car in front of it.”

For example, Tesla cars cannot drive themselves. But the name of the driver assist feature is Autopilot, which could easily lead consumers to assume the car is capable of much more than it is.

A report from Axios AV editor Joann Muller details the NTSB and NHTSA investigations into three Tesla crashes: A March 1 incident in which a man died when his Tesla drove under a semitrailer that was crossing a Florida roadway; a 2018 incident in which a Tesla crashed into a highway barrier in Mountain View, Calif.; and another 2018 incident in which a Tesla crashed into a stopped fire truck in Culver City, Calif.

If the Tesla technology is unable to prevent crashes into trucks and roadside barriers, the prospect of these vehicles avoiding motorcycles seems small.

Even if the technology is effective, studies show that many drivers disable the features, Sayre said.

A survey released in January by Esurance found that one in four drivers who wanted high-tech features in their cars have deactivated at least one feature.

And, overall, drivers with in-car technology tend to be slightly more distracted than those without it. The survey showed that 29 percent of respondents found the warning sounds themselves can be distracting.

What’s being done

The AMA has focused on convincing vehicle manufacturers and software developers to ensure that motorcycles are accounted for in their technology.

And the AMA has been pressing elected officials and federal regulators to hold companies accountable.

At the same time, a number of AMA members were appointed to the federal Motorcyclist Advisory Council. And Sayre was appointed MAC chair.

The MAC will speak out on behalf of America’s motorcyclists in the areas in which it is authorized to advise the Secretary of Transportation.

Two other groups—one in the United States and one based in Europe—have emerged to address the way motorcycles will interact with other vehicles and smart roadways in the future.

The Connected Motorcycle Consortium, based in Germany, was founded in 2016 when BMW Motorrad, Honda and Yamaha agreed on the need to improve motorcycle and scooter safety. Joining the three founding members are KTM, Triumph, Suzuki and Ducati.

Those in the group recognized that motorcycle safety was not being sufficiently considered in connected mobility, vehicle-to-vehicle communications and what it calls cooperative integrated transportation systems.

“CMC aims to create a common basic specification for motorcycle [intelligent transport systems], with as many cross-manufacturer standards as possible,” the group’s website states.

The goal is to introduce powered two wheelers equipped with cooperative integrated transportation systems by 2020.

In the United States, the Safer Motorcycling Research Consortium was founded this year by American Honda Motor Company, BMW Motorrad, Harley-Davidson, Indian Motorcycles, Kawasaki Motors Corp. USA, and Yamaha Motor Corporation USA.

Mike Hernandez, Safety Standards and ITS Technical manager at BMW of North America, is chair of the board for the consortium. He said the SMRC will be working with the CMC, as well as initiating its own projects.

“The SMRC is taking a holistic approach to motorcycling safety,” he said. “As evidenced by our name, we are not just focusing on motorcycle technology but will be looking at all aspects that have an influence on rider safety.

“By way of example, we may consider improvements to passenger cars to better detect motorcycles, enhancements to rider training programs, improvements to infrastructure, rider equipment and any other aspects of the motorcycle riding ecosystem that might save lives and reduce injuries.”

SMRC initially was formed with the intent of operating along the lines of the federal Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership model, which involved collaboration between the industry as project lead and NHTSA as advising partner, according to Hernandez. Both parties contributed to funding.

“In the case of the SMRC, we intend to follow a similar setup,” he explained. “However, NHTSA has indicated that they may conduct research independently, with SMRC in an advisory role, so 100 percent of the funding would be from the government.

“Of course, the SMRC is not opposed to this concept, however, we don’t intend to rely on NHTSA for funding all of the research. In the case of CAMP-style funding, we would then disburse grants to research partners as needed.”

Since both BMW and Honda manufacture motorcycles and cars, their perspective will help form the SMRC effort, Hernandez said.

Anti-trust laws prohibit the companies from sharing proprietary technology that is being used on member vehicles.

The SMRC will be examining the existing research done by the federal government—for example, the NTSB Safety Report (SR-18/01) and the ITS-JPO Gap Analysis (FHWA-JPO-18-700)7—that could lead to the development of specific technology.

“In the near term, we are considering evaluations of the existing passenger car sensor systems in their ability to detect motorcycles,” Hernandez said. “For example, can a car’s blind spot monitor detect motorcycles sufficiently?”

The future

No doubt, AV technology has the potential to be effective at reducing the number of non-motorcycle crashes and fatalities, Sayre said.

The AMA concern is that this technology will continue to be rolled out with little concern for motorcyclists, who are among the most vulnerable users of U.S. roads.

“Without the cooperation of the vehicle manufacturers and the tech companies, accompanied by more stringent oversight by federal regulators, future vehicles on America’s roadways will be inadequate for use in an environment shared with motorcycles,” Sayre said. “Automated-vehicle technology holds promise for improving motor vehicle safety and saving lives, but only if it is implemented correctly and in a manner that considers all elements of the traffic mix.”

Shea is no stranger to the personal risk involved – many years spent as a high level back-flipping BMX freestyler have made him very familiar with how hard the ground is. He’s also got the skills to plan and build an extreme machine like a land-speed racer thanks to many years building custom bikes. As far as the electric angle? He’s spent the last several years working with EVs at the upcoming industry’s coalface in Silicon Valley.

That doesn’t mean it’s a simple project, though, and over the phone from his home in California, Nyquist talked us through some of the challenges, opportunities and speed bumps between him and a new fully streamlined electric motorcycle land speed record.

What follows is an edited transcript of our chat.

Loz: Is this an outright electric land speed attempt?

Yeah, I used to work at a couple of different EV companies in Silicon Valley – SF motors, which is Seres now I guess, and Octillion Power Systems, which built batteries for EVs. Through those, I basically became the guy people would go to, to recycle their batteries.

A lot of people I’d do work for would be like “hey, we’ve got these old batteries, do you wanna take ’em?” And I’d be like sure, there’s about 80% left in them. Through one of the deals, I ended up convincing them it’d cost money to recycle them, even though they were still good. So they threw in a free powertrain, a motor and inverter, too.

Usually I flip stuff like that, but my fiancee and I went to Bonneville that year, and we saw some motorcycles at the Mike Cook event, which is the elite people in the game. I saw some of the bikes, and I’d been a bike builder for like 15 years. I caught the bug, and when I got home I was like “man, I could build an EV one.”

And I started looking at the records, and it turns out there’s no streamliner motorcycle record. There’s Eva Hakansson, who has the sidecar one for streamliners, but there’s no real streamliner style one.

Loz: I remember chatting with Mike Corbin last time I was over there, didn’t he have an electric streamliner back in the 70s, with stolen silver from the US Army and all sorts of crazy stories going on?

Yeah, that was a partial streamliner. A sit-on type bike, partially streamlined, so it’s like PSC or PSL… A little bit different of a class. There’s a bunch of classes, obviously. But my goal, after I figured out what I had from this deal, I went and just designed the fastest thing I could do, and it ended up being, with my calculations and a couple other people, it was almost 300 miles per hour.

So I was pretty excited. And I thought “I’m just gonna go ahead and do it!”

 

Loz: So seeing as there’s no current record, you could go out there and do ten miles an hour and come home with it, could you?

Yeah, but I don’t want to! I want the fastest electric motorcycle, which right now is Eva Hakansson with her sidecar setup. So that’s kinda the goal, and I’ve been building the chassis and everything to be adaptable for non-recycled materials. So if I can go out and get a respectable 200-plus run, I could potentially then start moving towards trying to integrate other people’s powertrains into it and get more power out of it.

Right now, I have a pretty dumb system, it’s like 200 kW, 22 kWh battery, all used cells, like iron phosphate. I’ve already found some replacement stuff, but it’s be nice to integrate people’s new platform and use it as a test bed to continue furthering the land speed record for electric.

The main goal in the end, years from now, would be to catch up to the gas guys on the two-wheel setup. That’s like Ack Attack, and BUB, and people like that. That’s totally achievable – what I have right now is pretty dumb honestly. I built it in my garage.

As far as the chassis and stuff, everything’s up to code, but the drivetrain’s all recycled materials and completely on the cheap. I just got the bug and decided I wanted to go forward with this.

I’ve been doing it for the last year and a half, coming up on two years this summer, and now I’m getting to the point where I just put the bike on the ground with all the powertrain in it, and I’m tuning the suspension and getting ready…

I was talking to Mike Corbin, he’s actually just 30 minutes from me, and I approached him not knowing that he had that electric record. I just just going “hey, you’re a guy that does some fiberglass stuff, lemme talk to you.” And he brought me in for like a 3-hour meeting, super interested in the project, and was potentially going to sponsor me and build me a full body, but I think he’s a little busy right now so he pulled out on that. But you know, I think he’s one of the people that’ll push forward with it as well.

Loz: He’s a man of many resources. That factory is amazing, it’s like a little wonderland.

Yeah, he walked me through it. I was really surprised, I thought those guys just did seats!

Loz: Let me back up a bit. I’ve been talking to some guys lately about recycled batteries, one of them was mentioning that on a lot of battery packs, what happens is that out of say 100 18650 cells, it’s often just the ones at the ends that get fried, and if you throw those out, the rest of them in the middle are often in terrific shape. Are you finding that as well?

Yeah, so the pack that I got had one bad string in it. It was iron phosphate, and it was 95S, and one series set was dead, meaning that the whole pack was dead according to whoever that company was.

But I pulled it apart, and all the other cells were pretty good. They’d been abused – it was some sort of dyno setup, so they hammered it real hard, but they’re at like an 85 percent state of health. Plenty of energy in ’em.

It’s one of those things where there’s so many components inside, and everything’s so fresh and new as far as the manufacturing process is concerned, that most times a battery will go bad and it’ll be something stupid inside, like a non-servicable fuse, or a contact that blew up, and then you’ve got this pack filled with $5000 worth of batteries, and they’ll be like “ugh, just recycle it.” It’s one of those things.

Luckily the one I got for the bike wasn’t bonded. It was all resistance welded. You could unscrew all the terminals and everything. My battery pack is iron phosphate, it’s fairly dumb, but it won’t explode into flames, it won’t propagate, it’ll just go dead if something goes wrong with it.

One of the reasons I persisted with that battery is that my life’s on the line. This battery’s super powerful, even though it’s heavy and massive. It’s pretty much free, it’s safe, and I don’t need to spend $3000 on electronics to control it.

Loz: The other thing I wanted to follow up on, you said you had a history of building bikes?

When I was 15 or 16, I bought a motorcycle without my parents knowing. I fixed it in my buddy’s garage and I went and rode around, I got the motorcycle bug. I moved to North Carolina, because I was riding BMX bikes professionally. My brother’s Ryan Nyquist, if you’ve heard of him, the X-Games guy.

I used to take photos of him to make money, and sell ’em to the magazines. And during the day I’d go and work at a motorcycle shop where I’d build custom Harleys and Hondas, weird shit. I learned how to TIG weld, mill… You know, early 2000s choppers. Fat tires, big Harleys, extreme colors and stuff like that.

I continued to do that when I moved back to California where I grew up. Just in my garage, and I sold to friends, and I built people bikes. I’ve probably built 30 motorcycles from beginning to end, whether that’s modifying a frame or building a frame from scratch. So yeah, chassis design, sheet metal, weird brake setups, electronics, I’ll do all that stuff.

And then I went to school for Aerospace out at San Jose State. After I was done with photography and everything, and my body was all wrecked and tired from BMX, I had to get a real job. So I went back to school and got an aerospace degree.

So I’ve used that now, as well as a few contacts, to do the aerodynamics on the body, figure out my coefficient of drag, my cross-sectional area, and build the road load equation, which is used to equate how long it’ll take you to what speed you’ll be doing at the end.

So I’m trying to design this body with a large amount of initial prep going into it. From what I’ve gathered from other land speed people I’ve spoken to, a lot of people just build the sexiest, smoothest thing they can do, and then try and control it from there. I’m trying to start from the beginning and make sure it’s stable. It’s a very interesting problem, I’ve never encountered such a complex interaction between mechanical and aerodynamics and everything else.

So it’s super fun for me to talk to all these people, hear their points of view, either an academic point of view or one from a guy who’s actually gone 400 miles an hour. Sometimes there’s extreme variance on what they think makes things go fast. Do you go with the guy that’s gone 400, or do you go with the guy with a master’s degree for Formula One? I’ve used this as a bit of a diving board for meeting new people in the area that do all this stuff.

Loz: So in terms of basic specs for this bike, you said 200 kW?

200 kilowatt motor. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein motor. It was built for a testing solution by that company I spoke of earlier. It’s been proven on the dyno for 200.

As far as the max output for length, I might have some problems with cooling. So I have a bunch of solutions for that, like an ice box, a chiller. But the peak power is 200. And if I can ramp up to that and get it going, I should be able to maintain that for the length of the track.

Loz: There’d be no traction control or anything like that? That’d be a bit complex for this sort of build?

Yeah, well kind of. One of my buddies from the rocket project…

Loz: Rocket project?

Oh yeah, we built a rocket engine for our senior project, I didn’t mention that. Basically a missile that shoots satellites into space from a jet fighter. We actually built a version of the first stage rocket engine, and fired it off in an abandoned missile silo in Wyoming. That was really cool.

Loz: You’re making me feel like I’ve had some pretty boring weekends!

Well, it was over decades! This is my traction control sensor. I’ve got a hall sensor in front and a hall sensor in back, and a 3D printed holder for them. They’re just magnetic pickups. This is a test rig for it. There’ll be one on the front wheel and one on the back. They’ll instantaneously compare RPMs between the front and back wheel, and if they’re off by 10 percent, a light will light up in the cockpit. That’s my traction control! Just a feedback loop telling me if I’m doing a burnout basically, because otherwise I might not know until I’m falling over!

As I go through this project … like, Mike Corbin, he came back to the house and checked out the project. He was explaining this to me, and I was like “that’s a good point, I should build something for that!” I came up with this dumb solution so I didn’t have to purchase a $2000 VCU that wouldn’t work with the motor I had.

A lot of what I’ve learned talking to these old timers is that it’s mostly about the driver. The driver’s super important. You can get a whole computer and tune the traction control, but salt is never the same twice. Usually the traction control just holds you back. These guys generally just get out there and do it.

So I’ve had this mentality of fixing it as I go, and trying to work out what’s important and where I need to spend money. Parachutes, fire suppression, all the safety stuff. For everything else I just try to create stuff from scratch!

I made my own vehicle control unit with a buddy of mine. On an EV, that’s mostly the interaction with the inverter. Then you have a thumb throttle for the gas, a thumb throttle for the brake. Those are hooked up to an Arduino, which is fast enough to control the motor and also has enough inputs to reliably tell the motor what to do. It has a CAN bus shield on it, which is like the communication protocol between cars, like an OBD. We programmed that protocol to talk to the inverter.

It’s super dumb. We only have the minimum requirements for all this stuff. But I’ve made it as robust as I could without breaking the bank.

Loz: Well, you remember how Corbin would do his throttle back in the day, right?

Yeah, he had a series of connectors where he’d just jam these contactors down, and continue to ramp up the voltage, he had three or four settings, like “on, more on, and all the way on” or something. (laughs)

Loz: And there was some wire that was designed to blow so he could actually get the thing to stop … So when you’re saying your system is dumb, it seems to be well within the tradition!

That’s the mentality I’m going for! I’m entirely self-funded. It’s pretty much me for the whole thing. A couple buddies helping me with a few parts, but otherwise it’s just me and my fiancee out there wiring the bike …

She just pushed me down the driveway the other day, without the motor in it, so I could learn how to balance and control it. We used the pickup truck to drag it up my driveway, and then she’d push me, I’d get up to 5, 10 miles per hour, and then go down the hill trying to figure out how to balance it.

Loz: What state’s the bike in right now, has it got a fairing on it?

No, it’s on the ground, the battery is assembled, but I haven’t ramped the voltage yet. The drivetrain’s in, I have to weld on a couple more things. I’m reinstalling the wiring harness so I can get the wheel to turn with the battery voltage.

Next weekend I might take it out down the street. There’s a little one lane road that’s like half a mile, where I can probably get it up to about 60 miles an hour. Just to make sure I’m not throwing errors on the motor, or having issues with connections, or anything like that.

Loz: How do you balance one of those things, can you stick your legs out?

No, basically I built a stabilizer that comes down, almost like landing gear. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to build that, because it’s in a tiny slice of space between the battery and the firewall.

I had a hydraulic jack I was going to try to run to bring those stabilizers down, but that would’ve had a heavy 12 volt load on the system. Then I bought a bunch of aircraft cable, and I was gonna try a cable pull system with a latch. But those two systems didn’t have positive locking, which you need to have according to the rule books. They need to lock in place mechanically.

So I bought a screw-on style trailer jack, and turned it upside down, and I stuck a Makita drill on the end. I cut the handle off, re-printed a handle for it in the cockpit. So in the cockpit, I can turn the switch for the Makita to change direction, and hit the trigger, and that spins the jack up and down, and that’s attached to a linkage which then controls the outriggers. It’s pretty trick honestly, it turned out really good.

I had the Makita gear because I sent them a package telling them what I was up to, and they sent me a bunch of tools. And I was going to go buy a linear electric actuator, and I started looking at pricing and speed and load, and then I realized I had that Makita drill sitting right there, which had its own convenient slide-in battery that I had a charger for right there – and it’s got its own isolated 18-volt system that’s separate from the bike, so there’s no load draw or anything like that!

Loz: Does that get them a sticker on the bike?

Yeah, for sure! There’s a few people that’ve been chipping in, like maybe a thousand bucks here and there to help me out with safety gear and stuff, they’ll get their sticker on the side too!

But right now the side of the bike is probably gonna be crappy sheet metal or something. I’ve been trying to move forward with this, but I’m getting close to the deadline, so I think I’m just gonna go to the metal store and create a steel tubing structure around the bike, and just pop rivet sheet metal to it. And just roll paint it black for now. Just so I can get a little bit of aerodynamics, and move forward with the project.

I was going to go out there with nothing on it, but it turns out that’s way more dangerous. The aerodyamics are completely altered, and if you fall there’s nothing protecting you, and you can end up having much more of a violent crash.

Loz: What is your deadline?

I’m trying to get out to El Mirage in late June or July. And I haven’t signed up for Bonneville, but Bonneville is mid-August. That’s where I wanna go out there and open it up.

But I’m coming in as a rookie, so I’ll have to qualify, and make my way through tech, too. Hopefully I can get out there to get some sort of record, but it’s more difficult than it used to be, I guess.

Loz: What kind of safety gear are you putting in?

The rule book has full safety gear for your body. Streamliners are fully enclosed, so they treat them kind of like cars. It’s a reclined driving position, kind of like a Formula One car. So there’s a 7-point harness, a HANS device, like a head and neck restraint, and that’s super constrictive. A face sock, a fire suit, race shoes, gloves.

Then for the battery I have an isolation detection, so if there’s any leakage from internal voltage to the outside chassis it’ll detect it and shut down the bike. Fire extinguishers, I needed two of those, and two parachute tubes, one for high speed, one for low speed. And a tip over sensor that automatically deploys the parachute.

Most of those things you can’t skimp on. The parachutes are 800 bucks a piece. The fire bottles, I spent like 2500 bucks just on those. There’s certain things you can’t skimp on to pass tech.

In the rule book, it says the fire extinguishers need to go near the exhaust header and on the oil pan of the motor. So it’s like “ok… I’ll put them on the battery and the motor?” I actually called them to ask about that, I didn’t want to rock up and have trouble with tech inspection.

Loz: What’s this whole thing going to end up costing you?

I haven’t been keeping track, because I really don’t wanna know! I’d say … The biggest thing is getting out to the track. It’s like 7 or 800 bucks just to sign up to run. In the end it’ll be somewhere around $15,000 or something like that. That’s not too bad.

The majority of costs I would’ve accrued would’ve been the battery and the motor. Most of that stuff … A motor’s like 10G for a Tesla drivetrain. And a battery, making it custom would be like 8 bucks a cell … Maybe $20,000 for that as well. So I saved a lot of money on the drivetrain, and the rest was like tubing, wiring … A lot of that stuff I already had from building motorcycles.

I had all the welders, I had the mill, everything else, so I’ve saved money on tooling just because it’s been a hobby for a long time.

Loz: How much can you see once you put a fairing up?

I had to make a big decision in the beginning, which was how to hold the front wheel in place. On a normal motorcycle, the forks come up, the wheel size is maybe 20 something inches tall, and with a triple tree on top of that, there’s a lot in front of your face.

I was thinking about trying to build an internal hub steering system, then I’d just be able to see straight over the tire. That’s what BUB uses, and what Ack Attack uses … But after talking to those guys and looking at Ack Attack’s bike, I was like “that’s beyond me!” The bearings for that are insane.

So I was gonna try to shorten a telescoping front end, like a Harley, and put heavy duty shocks in it, and more oil. And I built an aluminum triple tree, and after I finished machining these out, I sit down and it’s blocking my whole vision forward. I was like “son of a bitch!”

So I scrapped that front end and built a new front end, something like a souped-up Vespa configuration. It has a pivoting swingarm, and two shocks in front from the swingarm up, and that tapers in almost like a Harley Springer, really narrow. That does block my view, I get a couple inches of horizon, then the center of it is blocked by a steering damper.

Loz: So how do you steer something like that?

It’s got tillers. Those are attached to a linkage that goes up to the bottom triple tree on the fork and controls it. I built in some adjustability as to how much movement at the handles it takes to create a certain degree of movement at the wheel.

Balancing is a feat in itself. I’m surprised I got it, it took five or six tries to keep it up without falling over. Once I get it up to higher speeds it should be much better. I’ve been watching a guy who did streamliners to see how much they needed to move the bars, and how much steering I should expect.

Loz: It gains stability as it gains speed, so you won’t be moving it much at all when you’re up and running!

At slow speeds you have to anticipate, it’s not like riding a bike where you just lean and push, you have to turn the handlebars quite a lot to catch yourself from falling over. You have to turn into the fall, and feel when the bike gets back upright, and then as soon as it’s upright you have to turn right back in to get yourself straight again. There’s a lot of really quick, tight steering movements, I’ve got a video up online, it shows my hands going back and forth like mad, the back wheel’s staying pretty still but the front wheel is all over the place.

Loz: So that’s positive steering, and then once you get up to a certain speed you start countersteering like on a normal motorcycle, but I’ve heard there’s a further effect that happens when you get to really high speeds the steering reverses itself again. I’ve only heard of it on the land speed stuff. Can’t remember where I read it, but it just fascinated me this idea that you steer right to go right, then after a certain speed you steer left to go right, and then at some very high speed it switches around so you steer right to go right again.

I’ll tell you when I get there! Haha! At that point I think the track’s pretty wide. Coming from a BMX background, I have a pretty good sense of balance. That’s how I have a feel for the slow speed stuff.

Loz: This whole thing just sounds like so much fun. I love shoestring efforts at crazy things.

Normally I wouldn’t do it, but after I started looking at the record, and it seemed achievable… I mean, if I tried to go for the motorcycle land speed record right now, it’s just so far out of my league. The gas one. Oh my god, how much money, how much time, how many people would I need to help?

But I looked at this one and thought “nobody’s filled this void, and I have a head start with all this stuff, and the knowledge in my background. This is what I should be working on right now.”

So I’m trying to keep the costs low and do what I can. It’s getting pretty exciting, it’s getting real right now. I dropped the bike on the ground with everything in it, and looked at it and thought “holy crap, I’m really gonna get in this thing and go two hundred and something miles an hour?”

Loz: What’s the fastest you’ve ever been on two wheels?

Like 166 mph on a Hayabusa in the back roads of North Carolina.

Loz: Stuck in fourth, were you?

Haha! I was lugging sixth! I thought I was cool, look at me, I’m in sixth gear! I’m comfortable going relatively fast, but we’ll see what happens when we try to double that.

It might end up being a lifelong goal to achieve this. I’ve just wanted to go fast, and I think this is the perfect platform for that.

The next step for me in this project is I’m kinda pushing the marketing side. That’s why I reached out to you, and some other people who do articles. I’m trying to get a bit more exposure and get people to help out. I’d love to push this out to potentially help with monetary stuff.

There’s a bunch of people writing about all sorts of EV stuff right now, it seems like this fresh and new thing.

Loz: And you seem like you’re right in the thick of it right now, there’s a few absolute nutbags in Northern California doing all sorts of crazy stuff. It’s a real hotspot for cross-breeding of crazy people with crazy goals.

There’s just a lot of cool and unique people in this area, and there’s a buzz around the EV stuff at the moment. It’s fairly easy to get yourself into it, and if you’re capable, maybe you can build something. There’s a lot of people I know doing EV projects.

You can follow Shea Nyquist’s progress toward a land speed record at his YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYyWbIfM9ZF6cWWAiTYRHXg