Originally Posted By: swimmer
I respect your personal choice regarding helmets. But according to the crash test dummy guys, your perceived drawbacks are not true:
http://www.iihs.org/research/qanda/helmet_use.html
I must have missed these past few posts.
Sorry, I take information from iihs with a grain of salt as they are definitely biased against motorcycles. Read the following excerpt from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highway_Safety
Bolded portions by me
"The IIHS has come under scrutiny on several occasions since the 1980s over what some consider
unfair bias toward certain vehicle types, namely some small pickups and
certain types of motorcycles. Since the IIHS first-and-foremost represents the interests of the 80 insurance companies from which it receives its funding, critics such as the American Motorcyclist Association have suggested that the
IIHS sometimes seeks to influence legislation aimed at making insurance companies more profitable, rather than benefitting the public interest.[8]
In 1980, the IIHS helped 60 Minutes produce a report slamming the Jeep CJ in which a superhumanly capable robot apparatus was used to put the vehicles through 435 unrealistic test runs to get 8 rollovers.[9]
The IIHS released a report in 2007
suggesting that certain types of motorcycles be either banned or restricted from use on public roads, specifically sportbikes, after lumping together several different types of non-sport motorbikes into makeshift categories,
allegedly to skew the crash data in favor of its argument. The 2007 report mirrored a similar IIHS study released in 1987, which was claimed by the IIHS to be based on findings in the famous Hurt Report motorcycle crash study, and which was used to influence U.S. Sen. John Danforth into proposing a law that would have mandated horsepower limits for bikes sold in America. Dr. Hugh H. (“Harry”) Hurt, Jr.,
the noted author of the Hurt Report, called the 1987 IIHS study "sloppy" and "fatally flawed".[10]
Citing its similarities to the 1987 report, AMA called the 2007 IIHS report "...a bike classification shell game". An AMA news release stated: "We beat the IIHS sportbike ban [in 1987], and we even got Sen. Danforth on our side, saying that he recognized that the AMA had the constituent interest in motorcycle safety and that his IIHS-backed bill was a 'dead-end street.'".[11]
Ed Moreland, AMA vice president for government relations, said of the 2007 report: "
This kind of flawed report, passed off as scientific research, has the potential to do great damage. At the very least, it can create false perceptions we’ll have to fight for years. And at worst, it could lead to restrictive laws that have no basis in reality.”."
If they are willing to play games in an attempt to ban or restrict certain types of motorcycles, I see no great leap for them to play with the numbers regarding helmet use statistics.
