What’s safer than landing on a cushion of air? How about not crashing at all? It’s too bad that we can’t always stay upright on our bikes as intended, but at least airbag suit technology is advancing very rapidly these days. The latest development is a new airbag vest from Alpinestars, intended to protect motocross racers.
If you think about it, this must have been a very difficult design to put together. First-gen roadracing airbags were activated by a tether, until accelerometer technology progressed far enough that gearmakers could program “brains” into the equipment that detected a crash, instantly inflating your protective airbag. Somehow, they had to design the sensors so that they could tell the difference between normal roadracing clanging and banging and an unintended crash, and then make the suit inflate so quickly that it protected the rider while the crash was still underway.
That’s tricky, but to take things even further, Alpinestars then adapted this tech to the world of trail riding, rally raid and enduro with the Tech-Air Offroad (see our previous coverage here). Considering the roughness of dirt biking, that’s even more impressive. But now they’ve taken it to an even more difficult level with the Tech-Air Motocross vest.
This just-released upper body protector offers an inflatable airbag fore and aft, protecting your chest, back and shoulders in a crash. It’s worn just like normal upper body protection is. Riders can wear it over or under any normal-fitting moto gear, and it’s easy to operate, says Alpinestars’ PR:
“Activating the Tech-Air MX is easy; simply attach the left buckle of the System to the Chest Protector, and an internal magnetic switch will detect the left buckle is closed and automatically turn on and activate the Airbag System. Detaching the left buckle will automatically deactivate and turn off the System.”
Once it’s activated, the suit relies on six integrated sensors, including a triaxial accelerometer and a triaxial gyroscope, that tell the vest when the rider’s body has taken unexpected bump or bang, or is otherwise headed for trouble, with AI monitoring algorithms that run every millisecond. These algos were written based off years of data monitoring the riding of pro motocrossers. Based on the information they’re constantly analyzing, when they detect a crash, these sensors tell the airbag to inflate. As per the PR:
“Upon the identification of a crash situation, the algorithm will trigger the deployment of the protective Airbag, providing unrivaled protection to the rider (with an average inflation time of 40 ms, depending on the volume of the airbag size). The impact absorption while wearing the Airbag when inflated, results in the System being more than 4 times as protective as passive impact protectors.”
Currently, this technology is only in pre-production, with Alpinestars-backed riders getting the tech. When this gear is available to customers, it will come with three different riding modes, with an algorithm that’s optimized to match the riding situation the rider is in (probably a race mode, a practice mode and maybe a trail riding mode or something like that).
