Snell vs DOT and ECE which is better???

Interesting article about Snell helmets. According to this article a cheaper DOT helmet might be safer???

>>>Motorcycle Helmet Design, Helmet Standards and Head Protection - Gear Box - Motorcyclist Online<<<

 

cant slip nothin by u Struka LOL.. my bad for repost, its been a lonnng winter. if anyones bored and has lot of time they can read the whole novel. for now i think ill stay with my Snell rated helmet to protect my jello noggin.

 

Really, it comes down to what kind of impact you will have. Which of course is impossible to know. There was an article in Motorcyclist a few years ago about Snell and DOT that I thought was pretty interesting. Basically, and please keep the flames down, I am really over simplyfying and recommend people read the whole article. The Snell standard allows higher amount of energy to reach your noggin, which sounds bad, right? Not so quick, the test also subjects the helmet to a higher impact speed, much higher. So that sounds good right, you figure hey I ride on the highway, and maybe reach elevated speeds on a nice back road, I want to protect my head even in a higher speed accident. But what motorcyclist found, or repeated from a study done in the UK, is that even in high speed accidents, the head rarely hits the pavement at high speed. Which sounds counterintuitive. But think about it, if you low slide in a corner at 60 MPH, and bang your head against the pavement your head doesn't hit the pavement at 60MPH, at least not with 60MPH of force behind it. Your head is really only hitting the pavement from about 4' or so (depending on the height of your head at the start of the accident). That sideways movement of the fall is what impacts your head into the pavement, not the 60MPH or 80 or 20MPH you were doing. What the accident study in the UK found is that the lower speed impact is what we receive 80 ro 90% of the time (geussing at the numbers, don't have the article handy, but it was real high). That in motorcycle accidents, it is very rare that we receive a blow at the speed we were going. Only when you plow into the back of a stopped truck or a brick wall and go over the handlebars head first. But the vast majority of accident head impacts are at slower speeds, coupled with the idea that most motorcycle accidents are at intersections and side roads, and the idea of building a helmet to withstand higher impacts seems wrong. Because how do they build a helmet for a higher impact test? They use a harder foam, one where it takes a harder impaact to deform it. The problem with that, is that at a lower speed impact the force isn't enough to fully crush the foam, or maybe not at all. So in exchange for high impact survivorability you give up low speed protectection where nearly 100% of the impact gets transmitted to your noggin. So although you may live, your speach may be slurrred or you might walk with a limp for the rest of your life, where as with a softer foam, it may have absorbed enough of the force that you would have walked away normally. The Motorcyclist article also attacked the criteria that has long been used as the standard for how much impact to the head we can take, saying new evidence and testing shows we are damaged at much lower impacts. And that protecting us from the high speed accidents at the risk of the low speed ones is foolish when the low speed incidents are far mor common, and in the high speed impact accidents you are more likely to suffer other injuries that may kill you anyway. So if you do plow into the back of a UPS truck at 60MPH, and go over the handlebars, no matter what helmet protections you have, you may very likely break your neck or back, or have massive internal bleeding that will kill you anyway. But to have that protection, at the expense of protection when you take a 40MPH turn and slide out in the sand or oil and bang your head, is far more important.

The article made enough sense to me that I went out and bought an ECE approved helmet instead of my long term insistance on a Snell approved one.

Spike