Motorcycle airbag jacket deploys over a speedbreaker: My experience

This is an absolute peach of a technology and if you can afford it, do get it, it is totally worth the money for the protection it provides.

BHPian AtheK recently shared this with other enthusiasts

Never knew that I will be replying to my own post so soon with a real life experience of my smart jacket in action

Sometime back I was out riding and was doing decent enough speeds on a highway I am extremely familiar with. There is a stretch where there are lot of trees and then suddenly road opens up, which creates a blind spot. While cruising at around 120 Kmh while I was about to get out of that stretch a car from a village road at very high speeds joined the highway, now either they were just ripping or they did not see me approaching because of the blind spot, either way they were way too high to enter the highway like that. To not crash into them i braked and swerved left missed them by a whisker and saw a service road ahead and decided to enter the service road as it was empty. I had just took a sigh of relief when I realised there is a speed breaker ahead at the entry of the road. I braked again but was too late and went over the speed breaker at some speed, I was thrown off my seat due to the impact, but held on to the handle bar and landed back on seat safely.

All this happened in a span of 3-4 seconds and I thanked my stars and guardian angle that nothing untoward happened, as the adrenaline died down after next few seconds I felt something pressing into my chest, that is when I realised that the airbag had deployed. The airbag had opened up and had kept my head straight as it covers the collarbone, chest and of-course the back. Luckily the speed breaker was a scientifically designed one and when I stopped to check on the bike there were no bent rims or fork oil leakage. In the mean time the airbag also deflated and jacket came back to normal shape and I rode back home.

Looking back at the incident I was mighty pleased by the way the jacket worked, the sensors worked like they should and since I did get thrown around on the bike there was a high possibility of me falling in which case the algorithms worked perfectly and saved me by anticipating a fall and deploying the airbag. Everything was so seamless that I could not even realise when the bag deployed, the technology used to build this jacket and the algorithms used are done to perfection.

Warranty Claim from Dainese.

Since there was no fall Jacket was absolutely fine and I was supposed to travel to Singapore for work in couple of weeks. I wrote to Dainese showroom and updated them of the activation and how it went over a speed breaker and jacket got triggered and if it will be covered Under warranty as Jacket is still fine. They sent me a form to fill and asked me to get the Jacket to there store once i reach Singapore. I took the jacket to them and they told me they will download all the data from the jacket and send to Italy team who will analyse the incident and then get back to me if the Jacket can be covered under warranty.

After few days they called me and told me that Italy team have analysed the data and the Jacket worked perfectly and they would have been much more worried if the airbag had not deployed in such an instance. I guess majority of testing has been done on roads without speed breakers, but then again who goes on a speed breaker at around 60-70 kph speed anyway. They though did say that since the jacket is pretty new as a goodwill they will only charge me labor and replace the air bag as free, which i was happy to agree with.

Replacement cost for airbag in Singapore for the Jacket is 500 SGD, but they replaced it for 200 SGD. In Europe it costs 250 euros and in US it is 300$. This is obviously an added cost, but then the safety it provides is unmatched. God Forbidden if I had fallen, it would have really had my back.

This is an absolute peach of a technology though and if you can afford it, do get it, it is totally worth the money for the protection it provides.

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