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The Snell Helmet Standard is Meaningless?

m0t0_ryder

m0t0_ryder

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Another interesting (though provoking?) video from FortNine.

[youtube]76yu124i3Bo[/youtube]
 
Jesus fucking Christ. Dude is the most annoying humanoid on the planet.

Could someone who is able to watch him without emptying a magazine into the monitor sum it up for me, please?
 
Turn the sound down and the close caption up.

Simply, the basic thesis is that the modern Snell standard is at complete odds wit the ECE standard. Snell want a "hard" helmet, ECE wants a "soft" helmet. The two points of view are pretty incompatible.

Europe is the dominant market for helmets, so if Snell wants its name on helmets that can be sold in Europe, there needs to be a ECE compatible Snell standard.

So, the Standard proposed by Snell is, essentially only part of what the ECE helmets are looking for (talking about rotational forces during the impact). But, apparently, it's enough to maintain compliance with ECE.

The major point of the video, however, is that Snell doesn't believe in the standard. That they have this watered down certification only for market compliance, not in actual belief that its a good standard. Also, the sticker for the both standards is the same, so at a glance you can't tell which one a helmet is meeting.

Too bad you can't listen to this guy, I typically find him insightful and informative, and love his dry humor and their production values are over the top.
 
DataDan said:
Jesus fucking Christ. Dude is the most annoying humanoid on the planet.

Could someone who is able to watch him without emptying a magazine into the monitor sum it up for me, please?
Click to expand...

Calm your clam
 
Makes me think my next helmet should be ECE and maybe I'll just buy a DOT sticker on eBay to keep CHP happy :-D
 
Dot is nearly meaningless.

ECE and FIM standards are best available.
 
Sounds a little like the drama after Princess Di crashed. Mercedes said "We want a rigid box!" Everyone else said "Crumple Zones FTW!" Not sure anyone came out on top.
 
DataDan said:
Jesus fucking Christ. Dude is the most annoying humanoid on the planet.

Could someone who is able to watch him without emptying a magazine into the monitor sum it up for me, please?
Click to expand...

I am with you.
Fuck this guy.
Fuck his dramatic videos.
Fuck his bullshit info.
The few videos I have been able to stomach from him were the equivalent of a dramatized true crime podcast. Mostly true info slightly sensationalized for maximum reaction. Never mind his absolutely dreadful cadence.
Seriously, fuck this guy.
 
mjj said:
Sounds a little like the drama after Princess Di crashed. Mercedes said "We want a rigid box!" Everyone else said "Crumple Zones FTW!" Not sure anyone came out on top.
Click to expand...
Rigid box or not, the only lesson worth learning from Di's crash is to buckle your fucking seat belt. :x

The controversy about the Snell motorcycle helmet standard dates back to 2005, when Dexter Ford of Motorcyclist Magazine wrote an article, "Blowing the Lid Off", which was critical of Snell:

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.​
Motorcyclist has apparently disappeared the article (it was not well received by advertisers), but it is available here as a PDF, courtesy of SMARTER USA, a private motorcycle safety advocacy group. Visit their home page and spend some time wandering around. They're good people and have collected some great material.


Harry Hurt had some things to say about helmet standards in a 2005 Motorcycle Consumer News interview with Wendy Moon:
Hurt insists that there is no reason the vaunted Snell certification should be preferred by motorcyclists over the more common DOT certification, though Snell uses more severe test impacts. The Snell criteria, he says, "have never been based on a rational evaluation of accident events... there are completely artificial, unsubstantiated elements in their standards."​
The interview is available here as a PDF at All Things (Safety Oriented) Motorcycle. It is the only place I know of that has preserved Moon's work from the now-defunct MCN. If you visit the site, I recommend that you check out the Safety Tips section, and you might also find useful information in the Forums.
 
I dig Ryan, FortNine is the Canadian (only) retailer that he makes videos for. Aside from maybe the RevZilla guys I can’t think of any other retailer whose video guy gets millions of views and makes such quality stuff. I can see how his style might not appeal to everyone, but his approach and content are solid - reasonable and aspires to a scientific methodology (I respect that).
 
So does anyone have any Data how the standards affect real world incidents and injury?

I mean, if you have no helmet and are involved in a crash, say you have a 60% chance (purely contrived and made up numbers) of a serious head injury.

Put on a helmet, say a DOT helmet, and lets say (again contrive made up numbers) that number goes down to 10%. Does the Snell standard reduce that to 9%? 2%? ECE to 8%?

Just curious what the, uh, impact of the differing standards are on the real world.
 
berth said:
So does anyone have any Data how the standards affect real world incidents and injury?
Click to expand...
Interesting question. I figured if anything like that had ever been done, it would be in the Motorcycle Crash Causation Study funded by the Federal Highway Administration.

In the study, 351 crashes in Orange County were investigated from 2010 to 2017 (I'm kinda guessing on the date range). The study home page is here. A PDF of the Final Report is here. Warning: If you're expecting anything like the Hurt Report, you will be disappointed. This project, well intentioned at the start, became a colossal boondoggle. No useful report was produced. Instead (the excuse goes), the main product was a database available to the public (except it really isn't) that others could mine for nuggets helpful to motorcyclists (except there are too few cases to give it adequate statistical power (Hurt and MAIDS investigated 900 each)). To my knowledge, no one has done anything with it since it was published in 2019. </rant>

Anyhoo, a search of the coding manual turned up a data element for helmet standard conformity, which includes all standards issued in this quadrant of the galaxy through the beginning of data collection. Good, so far. On page 85 of the Final Report (linked above) this appears:
60 percent conformed to FMVSS 218 (USDOT), 10 percent conformed to Snell M2005 (USA), 95 conformed to UN/ECE-22-05 (Europe), 8 percent had no standard label on their helmets, 8 percent conformed to Snell M2010 (USA), and 3 percent conformed to Snell M2000 (USA).​
An astute copy editor would notice that ECE is probably 9% but mistyped. Apparently, no copy editors were involved with this document.

No correlation between helmet standard and head injury appears in the Final Report. In any event, I expect that there are too few cases to make a statistically valid conclusion about helmet standards.
 
This guy is getting more over the top with each video he does but he backs it up with seemingly solid numbers. After watching the vid I went out to the garage and looked at my Shoei rf1200.
It got me thinking
 
DataDan said:
Jesus fucking Christ. Dude is the most annoying humanoid on the planet.

Could someone who is able to watch him without emptying a magazine into the monitor sum it up for me, please?
Click to expand...

Jalopyshoppe said:
I am with you.
Fuck this guy.
Fuck his dramatic videos.
Fuck his bullshit info.
The few videos I have been able to stomach from him were the equivalent of a dramatized true crime podcast. Mostly true info slightly sensationalized for maximum reaction. Never mind his absolutely dreadful cadence.
Seriously, fuck this guy.
Click to expand...

You guys do realize he does his videos in different 'styles?' Like Film Noir, Silent Films, etc.

Ryan does have a cadence but the dramatic or production side is generally copying film styles.
 
Well, that's just swell.

I didn't used to like the guy either, but since I've had so much time during the pandemic to watch youtube videos, I learned that they waste a lot of time on not so good content, so I've gotten used to playing them at 2x speed. I just can't watch anything at normal speed anymore. People sound like drunkards if I do.
 
I have been trusting my head to what are now ECE standards since 1973. DOT and Snell are all about industry self interest IMHO.
 
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