The 'World's Safest' Bike Helmet Has A Built-in Airbag (metro.co.uk) 148
H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports:
Easier to use, adjustable and enabled with Bluetooth technology, the helmet, according to H&âOEouml;vding 's CEO Frederik Carling, is the world's safest. Donning advanced airbag tech and functions such as the ability to contact next-of-kin in the event of an accident, Frederik and the team spent years surveying people to make the kit as bespoke, safe and desirable as possible. Fredrik says: "Our surveys of cyclists in seven major European cities show that 70% would cycle more if they felt safer. We have focused on this and want to contribute to greater safety."
New features include the new patented airbag, along with an upgraded battery that can last for up to 15 hours. An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives...
When the design-savvy headgear is activated, it registers movements 200 times a second and in the event of an accident, is inflated in 0.1 seconds to enclose the head and hold the cyclist's neck in place. 185,000 cyclists currently use it, with over 4,000 saying that it had made a significant difference during close calls.
In addition to all its safety features, Carling hopes that his helmet can be used to help the environment in the long run. "Cycling may be the answer to many of the challenges relating to the environment, congestion in cities and health, and we want to take cyclist protection to the next level," he says.
New features include the new patented airbag, along with an upgraded battery that can last for up to 15 hours. An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives...
When the design-savvy headgear is activated, it registers movements 200 times a second and in the event of an accident, is inflated in 0.1 seconds to enclose the head and hold the cyclist's neck in place. 185,000 cyclists currently use it, with over 4,000 saying that it had made a significant difference during close calls.
In addition to all its safety features, Carling hopes that his helmet can be used to help the environment in the long run. "Cycling may be the answer to many of the challenges relating to the environment, congestion in cities and health, and we want to take cyclist protection to the next level," he says.
Or alternatively.. (Score:2, Offtopic)
We could improve the infrastructure for non car transport like walking and cycling. Then people wouldn't have to live in fear of death by motor vehicle.
Also, I am bit dubious about a safety system with a 15 hour battery life.
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15 hours sounds awfully short. All you need to do is read out an 3-axis accelerometer chip, which should be 100 uW or so. You could even run that from a small solar cell embedded in the helmet.
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Yes, I know what it means. It means that it's an embarrassingly bad design.
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How has it been, from a comfort/weight/swear perspective? I currently ride without a helmet (existing passive ones are atrocious), and I'm strongly considering buying one of these.
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It is reasonably comfortable. It takes a bit to adjust to the additional weight on your upper back.
Make sure to get one that is not too tight. During summer you want it to be loose, so it does not get too hot, and during winter you want to be able to have a thin scarf under it to keep your neck warm. You can also wrap the hood from a hoodie around your neck.
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Look at a city like Amsterdam. Even in the very old areas there are bike lanes. In some cases, cars are no longer allowed.
https://bicycledutch.wordpress... [wordpress.com]
And look, nobody wears a helmet.
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Look at a city like Amsterdam. Even in the very old areas there are bike lanes. In some cases, cars are no longer allowed.
https://bicycledutch.wordpress... [wordpress.com]
And look, nobody wears a helmet.
No cars allowed? How are the needs of the handicapped addressed?
I'm pretty certain that closing off a roadway won't fly here because of the ADA. We have to give access to handicapped people and their vehicles. That street as shown won't cut it.
I give them points for being very pleased with themselves though.
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It's fixed by giving passes to people who have limited mobilty to get inside the city center with their cars anyway, plus dedicated parking spaces for them. Car-free city centers are usually gated with barriers that automatically go down when you show it such a pass.
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It's fixed by giving passes to people who have limited mobilty to get inside the city center with their cars anyway, plus dedicated parking spaces for them. Car-free city centers are usually gated with barriers that automatically go down when you show it such a pass.
Any examples? Now you have vehicles with the bikes again.
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Are you implying that riding without helmets is wise because people somewhere do that? Or is it that you believe that helmets are only required because of cars?
I am not surprised by the ignorance, just depressed by it.
BTW mountain bikers wear helmets and they aren't threatened by cars.
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We don't need to tear down cities to make room for bike lanes. Just get rid of all the private property storage, a.k.a. parking, and there will be more than enough room for bike lanes.
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Why must the choice be one or the other? Why do you think that infrastructure improvements obviate the need for head protection? Why would you think that a motor vehicle must be involved for a cyclist to die in an accident?
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I'm not going to walk 7 miles to the nearest large town.
I'm not going to cycle either, given that cycling has destroyed my knees; I haven't been able to run or jump for over a decade.
I'm also not physically "disabled"; I walked a couple of miles within an hour of getting out of bed this morning. It's still no fucking substitute for getting in a car and driving somewhere.
Don't even fucking pretend I should be getting on a bus. To have a bus meet my needs I'd have to own it and be the only person using it; it
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I've dislocated them on multiple occasions just swivelling to get on or off a bicycle, let alone the strain and stress that pedalling causes.
Blame my parents, they gave me these genes.
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Regretably the immortality doesn't preclude age related degeneration.
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The showers are part of the infrastructure that's needed.
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Agreed. I would love for more employers to provide at least gym benefits, if not locker rooms in the larger corporations, so we could shower before coming into work, or after taking a ride at lunch. I carry around a package of unscented baby wipes with me, and go back and forth on keeping a gym membership near work for showering (currently not, but I think I will again--just moved and started a new position a few months back).
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How does this help people who live in urban heat island shitholes that experience 50C weather?
It doesn't, but these places are exceedingly rare. For example, most cities in Europe have average daytime temperature less than 20C. You can bike at a decent pace in 20C weather without getting all sweaty.
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And if you add electric assist, the amount of effort required can be dialed to taste - including all the way down to zero. Include tricycles for cargo and the unsteady, and cycling could easily become a viable alternative for almost everyone. Provided the infrastructure was there. And a "simple" political decision could provide that in many places with very little new construction: All two-lane roads are now one-way, with the other side of the road being split into bike lanes. Repaint some lines and ad
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It doesn't, but these places are exceedingly rare. For example, most cities in Europe have average daytime temperature less than 20C. You can bike at a decent pace in 20C weather without getting all sweaty.
It's almost as if you don't know it depends on the humidity, not the temperature.
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The claim was: "You can bike at a decent pace in 20C weather without getting all sweaty"
Not so, it depends on the humidity.
Re: Or alternatively.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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And some of those areas will get close to 30 or 40C in summer with high humidity. And no one will be riding bikes in that except for physcos who are already doing it.
Not only did people happily continue to cycle to work through the heatwaves we've recently had, when I went on a joy ride during a 33C day I can conclusively say I've never seen so much joyriding traffic on the LF2 cycle route.
On behalf of Europeans everywhere (especially on behalf of those of us who used to live and cycle daily to work in Australia), toughen up princess.
There are a couple they put in close to me that are essentially empty 99.9%, meanwhile it ties up traffic and blocks ambulances, fire, and police in emergency mode from accessing the downtown.
I'm not sure why you're blaming a form of transport rather than blaming what is clearly incredibly poor town planning.
I've only see that before in third world countries. People, hard core cyclists, need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that not everywhere is ideal or even realistic for bikes.
Yeah, especially pla
Re: Or alternatively.. (Score:2)
Neither of these addresses the fact that muscular exercion makes you sweat; but at least your helmet can avoid being actively unhelpful.
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A passive helmet can actually have more airflow than an airbag, because you can put scoops on it. But then you'll look like a furry.
Wow. (Score:3)
H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports:
Just wow. We couldn't edit well enough to get the first word of the summary correct. I think that's a new record.
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The product's name is "Hövding". I'm surprised that it hadn't been rewritten without the umlaut as "Hovding".
It means chieftain, or rather the head of a clan.
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For fuck's sake, dashslot get yourself some competent content managers. Editor is clearly a stretch goal, so just a decent CMS maintainer is all we need. Unicode is disabled because of abuse, I get that.
DO YOU GET THAT AND HAVE A PLAN TO CONVERT UTF8 TO ASCII?
No. The answer is no.
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If I wanted CMS maintainers who care about their work, I'd go to the red site [soylentnews.org].
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Or just filter everything that isn't a common accent character.
(plus that pointless mangled output that Apple keyboards produce).
Abuse (5:erocS) (Score:2)
Even a single Unicode bidirectionality override character can completely fyayk up the layout. A blacklist is not enough because new versions of Unicode introduce new code points with semantics that some operating systems implement and deploy before the site admins have a chance to put it on the blacklist. I've called it the erocS problem [slashdot.org].
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Agreed. But whitelisting around a dozen harmless characters would probably solve more than 99% of the problematic posts.
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Or, and stay with me here, they could stick with ASCII and have a sane conversion. Or error on Unicode. Or literally any other outcome than garbage on a site that claims to be news for nerds.
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Par is never a record. By definition.
Sounds like a terrible idea. (Score:2)
Modern bike helmets are light, simple, comfortable and reliable. Replacing an excellent, cost-effective passive system with a more complex active system seems like a bad idea to me. Car airbags are a common source of recalls.
Cycling is an relatively safe activity, even helmet-less. A simple conventional helmet makes cycling *extremely* safe. Adding airbags not only creates accidental deployment issues in a system that is prone to mishandling in a less benign environment than a steering wheel or dashboa
Re:Sounds like a terrible idea. (Score:4, Informative)
Modern bike helmets are susceptible to be put on wrong, and CE markings only indicate that it protects the upper parts of the head, not the side, nor the back of the head. On top of that there is significant difference between how well helmets absorb and distribute energy. Swedish insurance company Folksam published a report [mynewsdesk.com] on this back in 2015. The report was one of the major reasons that I ended up with a Hövding, the basic reason being that its protection was significantly better than the best-in-class passive helmets.
Having said that, your reservations regarding malfunctions are not unfounded: I have had one with a battery malfunction, but at least the error was obvious, and I have been using these helmets since 2015.
Finally, safety when cycling is not a matter of helmets and other armor. It is a matter of designing infrastructure to be safe.
Re:Sounds like a terrible idea. (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that I speak as an avid cyclist riding 5-7 days a week, up to 200+ miles a week, for 15+ years now, not some bike-hating driver who wants to see them all disappear.
The lack of Driver Education and Driver Training in public highschools in this country means drivers are educated and trained poorly. Often they don't even remember to use turn signals to change lanes or even turn their head before changing lanes, let alone actually 'see' cyclists. They just don't register on the visual cortex of the average driver. That has to change.
Then there's the 'average' cyclist, who I see every day, riding down a public road on the wrong side, ignoring traffic controls, blasting through busy intersections without even looking, crossing the road in ways that would get you ticketed in a car, riding at night with no headlamp or taillamp, and generally acting like physics and traffic laws don't apply to them. That's just on the roads, we have 32 miles of uninterrupted MUP here, and they ride on those like they're the only person left alive in the world; some of them have almost (except for my reflexes saving me) got me in an accident due to their inattention. They need to be educated and trained better, too.
Just making more and wider bike lanes isn't going to solve the problem.
Then there's pedestrians. Stop walking around with your eyes glued to your gods-be-damned smartphone.
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As I said to someone else in this discussion already: you're not going to tear down cities just so you can make streets wider so you can have 'protected' bike lanes, it's just not going to happen. What we really need is better driver education and trianing, and better cyclist education and training.
Nevertheless that is exactly what happened in Copenhagen. Protected bike lanes were built on existing streets, taking road space from motorized vehicles. This effort is still ongoing. Sadly, I do not think that training is going to change much, with one exception: According to the Danish Accident Investigation Board, every time the number of bicycles in an area is doubled, the number of accidents involving motorized vehicles and bicycles is halved. Most likely because drivers are getting more used to there
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Finally, safety when cycling is not a matter of helmets and other armor. It is a matter of designing infrastructure to be safe.
Sure, but let's face it, there is no real way to have cars and bicycles co-exist safey.
Cars can swerve, and so can bikes. It's mass making the problem.
In my neck of the woods, we add a bike lane to all new new construction and most repavings. The cost is tremendous, and often involves eminent domain, for extra right of way, and in a few cases houses have been condemned and removed.
The law is that you are committing a crime if you don't give bikers at least 4 feet clearnance.
The results? The bike
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In Copenhagen most bike lanes are elevated roughly 10 cm compared to the road where the motorized vehicles are driving. This means that swerving into the lanes of the other type of traffic is rather uncomfortable, both for drivers and cyclists. And yes, this is by design, to make it safe.
Perhaps this is a wonderful solution for Copenhagen, where the moral choice has been made that Bikes occupy a moral high ground.
Let's face it, that is exactly what that article has stated, if not in a single sentence, the entire story.
The roads, given back the "the People"
Ugggh. Meanwhile, The US is a pretty big country, and not terribly comparable to Copenhagen. While we occasionally remove vehicles from a street, that goes for bicycles as well. Pedestrians only, Only vehicles permitted are wheelch
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Then I misunderstood your earlier statement. I was under the impression that you had bike lanes that were marked with painting on the asphalt. And those are neither very safe nor do they encourage safe behavior.
We have have those too. While it's great when you can keep them separate, it can't happen everywhere. The problem is the way we are built. There is a problem with eliminating vehicles other than bicycles on say a 25 mile road. But you want to try to accommodate bikes. So you add a bit over a meter of pavement on each side of the road. That's not only expensive, but the city or state is often taking people's land away from them to do it. No - it isn't ideal.
If I might make note of what happened at my univ
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No it isn't. Not even close.
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No it isn't. Not even close.
I live in Pennsylvania, and we do pay the highest fuel taxes in the USA, and roadwork is exactly what happens with our fuel taxes.https://wnep.com/2016/12/31/pennsylvania-gas-tax-hike-goes-into-effect/
And if you want to see the projects, you can go here http://www.projects.penndot.go... [penndot.gov] Either by county, or by state. Note, the entire state takes a while to load.
Pennsylvania has many miles of of paved road. A lot of this is because of things like the ridge and valley region.https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.g
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Modern bike helmets are light, uncomfortable, allow crap airflow, and aren't reliable in anything but the ideal crash situation.
Just my two cents, but I've busted up an awful lot of helmets and crashed with/without them hundreds of times, with the scars and broken bones to prove it. I'm an excellent rider, but you don't get to ride as aggressively as I like to and never crash.
Almost all crashes, except slow speed ones, wind up being low-side. I have yet to high-side on a bicycle, luckily, because I always d
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My first really exciting bicycle-riding incident was a high-side where I was on some loose gravel on top of pavement. I slipped, corrected, hooked back up, and went over.
The helmet ought to be able to work as well as a normal helmet if it doesn't activate. If it doesn't, it's poop.
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Oh that sounds like a terrible way to go. Hopefully it worked out somewhat okay. I watched their video on it inflating, and it seems like it'd provide protection more on par with a full face helmet, sans plate, than a typical bike helmet (the road bike style that's pretty much just a cap). I also like that it looks like it has a neck brace.
I've come close, by riding so low of an angle that the pedal clips the ground itself, pushing the bike up and causing the back wheel to hop, and recovering that can flip
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Different calibration on the risk tolerance. I am a *technically* excellent rider, but that requires getting much closer to the limit of my abilities and things like the traction on the tires. If you deliberately push those, you will eventually go over them. I don't know any cyclists from a racing background who don't have plenty of experience with crashes.
Lack of good judgement would be doing that sort of thing in the middle of traffic at rush hour.
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Different calibration on the risk tolerance. I am a *technically* excellent rider, but that requires getting much closer to the limit of my abilities and things like the traction on the tires. If you deliberately push those, you will eventually go over them. I don't know any cyclists from a racing background who don't have plenty of experience with crashes.
Lack of good judgement would be doing that sort of thing in the middle of traffic at rush hour.
Related - I do some volunteer work with professional off-road bicyclists. These guys and gals are nuts aggressive. My kind of people! Crashing with them is just part of the day. The tough part is when you have to talk someone out of stuff like taping their hand to the handlebar after a wreck , having broken their hand/wrist and not being able to grip with it. Or the guy that dislocated his shoulder, and refused a trip to the hospital, but granted us a trip to HQ, where he self medicated with beer. We did ta
Re:Sounds like a terrible idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but evidently with a user-base of less than 200k, 4k of them have reported this helmet saved them: a 2% crash rate would seem to indicate that there are some issues here. Like:
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Any helmet would've though, right?
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Spoken like someone who knows utterly nothing on the topic.
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Quite a few bike accidents-- not all-- are actually like that in my experience.
One of my worse bike crashes was much like that (this was the one out of many years of helmet wearing that the helmet clearly helped). One moment nothing unusual was going on, the next I was slamming into the ground, and I had to work out what had probably just happened by inference. [1]
That's what bike accidents actually can be like. You know that
transportation cycling (Score:2)
voxnulla wrote:
Depends on what you mean. The second worst, I sheered off a bottom bracket suddenly and lost balance as the left peddle dropped to the ground. I nervously looked over my left shoulder to make sure car traffic wasn't going to hit me, fell over and slammed my chin into the ground. This needed some stiches.
This is the only other one I can remember wit
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Observations during my daily bicycle commute is that the people wearing a Hövding are slow non-crazy riders on non-sporty bikes, mostly women, choosing the Hövding because it doesn't mess up their hair. They tend to look inexperienced or less proficient though, so they could be prone to silly accidents like hitting a curb or not keeping themselves on the bike while braking hard.
The crazy, aggressive and/or sporty bicyclists all have fixed, often expensive-looking helmets.
It might be the bike, not the helmet... (Score:2)
While various safety organizations
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Apparently you think that endo's are the only safety concern with bicycles, yet your experience would suggest that you know very well that other concerns are far more important. I'd say you are at the very least disingenuous and more likely an outright liar.
By far the most important safety consideration is being seen by other user of the road. In that respect, LBW recumbents are easily the worst type of bicycle from a safety standpoint. Recumbent riders literally resort to flags so that drivers can see t
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Adding airbags not only creates accidental deployment issues in a system that is prone to mishandling in a less benign environment than a steering wheel or dashboard, this particular design seems likely to make one weakness of contemporary helmets worse: neck injuries.
I was hoping for an airbag that was much bigger, and maybe decorated to make the user look like a Roblox.
Neck Brace vs. Helmet (Score:2)
This should be called a neck brace, not a helmet.
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I'd say it could best be described as a scarf that becomes a helmet...it doesn't look like it would really function as a neck brace before it's deployed.
Doesn't seem to protect well from a face plant. (Score:3)
Doesn't seem to protect your chin ... they should really get on that. It seems a great product for protecting people on scooters, but they need protection against face plants destroying their face even moreso than cyclist.
Also 14 hours of battery life on a safety device? How the fuck do you manage that on something which just has to read out some sensors and trigger an explosive device? Sure it has to phone home to the app occasionally, but that should be intermittent and irrelevant to power consumption.
I'm sure that finding a competent EE who can work with MISRA-C or similar will cost top dollar ... but after this long they should be able to do better. Having mobile phone level battery consumption is just embarrassing.
Has or Is? (Score:2)
Has its own airbag, or is an airbag?
Helmets are pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
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Normal commuting on a bike, means that the fast majority of accidents are side impact accidents or collision where the cyclist falls on the side. Wrists, shoulders, hips and pelvis injuries are the most common and neck and spinal injuries the most dangerous.
This. That's really how most crashes go.
You are ignorant - proven that helmets save lives (Score:3, Insightful)
The statistics show you are an ignorant fool spouting nonsense
Helmets reduce chance of death by 65%
https://www.theguardian.com/li... [theguardian.com]
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you show do like to run your virtual mouth
plenty of studies show helmets reducing chances of death exactly in the range of the one I linked
you have no point and no facts
that study is not the last word (Score:2)
I have to say, 65% sounds like a funny number-- if the effect was so strong, why did it take so long to find it?
This big meta-study (Oliver & Creighton [oup.com] ) covered data for 64k "injured cyclists": so the point is if you do get in a crash, the helmet is likely to help. While that's good to know, I don't think it tells us what we'd really like to know: out of a large population of riders, does wearing a he
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Didn't "take so long to find it", I just linked one study from dozens, it's known for decades.
Most bicycling deaths are from head injuries. Helmets help with that. Not arguing that there are a multitude other ways to get maimed, and that there are other types of bicycle deaths, of course there are.
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I think you are missing a fundamental part of understanding how to correctly analyse these types of matters.
For instance, every source you cite deals in pointless percentages. If you want to effectively measure road safety, you do this by looking at distance travelled in relation to the number of accidents.
Consider the official cyclists union source (you did not bother to check out) of the Netherlands (The cycling nation of the world). It shows that the use of helmets correlated to a increase of accidents w
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You are telling half the story:
"Of the injured cyclists wearing helmets, 50 percent were riding mountain bikes and 46 percent were riding racing bikes; meaning most helmeted cyclists in the Netherlands are engaged in a competitive activity, with very few making utility trips on the traditional style of Dutch bicycle."
Helmets used during normal bicycling reduce fatalities, that is the fact that many nations have concluded after studies. Your skewed interpretation misrepresenting the situation in the Netherl
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iggymanz wrote:
Sorry, no-- the last time I looked into this might've been ten years ago (but I don't think so) and I remember at that time concluding that it was peculiar helmet-wearing wasn't showing up as a stronger safety factor. E.g. studies of a particular area wasn't showing a reduction of injuries when helmet-use increased in the population of cyclists.
I can believe wearing a helmet improves your odd
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No, most walking deaths are not from head injuries. Most bicycling deaths are from head injuries.
Hence yes, foam in hard plastic saves lives. Verified fact.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Re:You are ignorant - proven that helmets save liv (Score:4, Informative)
Reading is hard isn't it? I said that a helmet would be more effective against head injury for pedestrians. Compared to cyclists, pedestrians have more head injuries, albeit perhaps less fatal. This still does not negate the fact that at sub 21kph speeds a helmet would be more effective for a pedestrian regardless.
The fact is that internal bleeding and blunt force trauma are the main causes of death in cycling accidents. But as I showed, even if it wasn't with 10K reported (as in serious) accidents on a population of 16M where 200 (160ish actually) were fatalities, you'd have only a 2% chance of dying IF you got into such an accident. So the helmet could perhaps make it 1%... Whoop di fucking doo.
More people would die due to lack of exercise because they would not want to wear a ridiculous helmet than the stupid thing would save.
Look, I understand that you are a bit upset because you got conned out of your cash to buy a useless helmet that makes you look like a cock and if you are indeed the type of idiot who thinks commuting on a bike means acting like a tour de France rider in a busy city, then the likelihood of you doing a swan-dive toward the nearest curb-stone would indeed go up significantly, then I'd even understand your need for the illusion of safety.
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"My country which has more bikes than people and is densely populated and nobody wears a helmet shows I am completely correct."
There ya go. Classic.
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it should be classic, it is true.
1.3 bikes per person
15 million km per year
A quarter of all commutes
880km per year per capita
16 million people
Only 10000 serious accidents per year on average
of those only 165 are fatal.
Of those 165 only a fraction would have been helped by wearing a useless styrofoam cup
It has been shown that helmet use increasing risk taking due to the false sense of safety. This increased risk taking results in more common injuries while the number of head injuries stays the same.
Not to me
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Even when you have poor infrastructure for bikes, a thinly coated piece of styrofoam with or without a bloody airbag will do fuck all for safety on average.
Yeah airbags are pointless in rear end collisions. I've been in a bike accident precisely once and my head hit went straight through the window of the car that pulled in front of me. I don't get to choose how I have an accident.
Old news, and not a great idea anyway (Score:2)
App? no thanks (Score:2)
"An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives..."
I will stick to Strava
Bicycle culture of Canada (Score:2)
safety feeling (Score:2)
if people on bikes don't feel safe, it's not because of the helmet they are already wearing.
it's because there is no infrastructure or in case there is, it is lacking making traffic not safe for them.
it's because people driving cars don't like cyclists and sometimes do dangerours things.
but you get this awesome helmet, your head is safe!
the rest of your body can go to hell, who cares if you break your back.
It *is* an airbag. (Score:2)
It's a collar that blows up into an airbag helmet when you fall. It actually works pretty good and you can get them at any well sorted bike shop here in Germany.
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The main problem is that it costs more than many people's bikes.
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It's news because this is the first time I've heard of it, dumbass. That's the definition of news. "Not yet a dupe on dashslot". M O O N that spells news.
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Most archaeology finds are much, much older than that, and yet their announcement is still news.
Newsiness is relative to the audience, not absolute, and not relative to the event.
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indeed I saw plenty of them this summer in Denmark... it seemed I was out of fashion with my trivial helmet :-)
It probably allows you to better feel the wind in your hair (but at my age I have almost no hair left!)
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First I've heard of it, and I've a very active cyclist. (Okay, so I don't wear a helmet--I stopped doing that after I stopped racing.)
This might actually get me to wear one again. Overheating from a helmet is a huge issue, and traditional helmets tend to strain your neck in anything but the ideal ballistic superman crash.
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Further thought: how does it detect crashing?
Because I ride very aggressively, sliding the bike, riding up and down stairs, occasionally flipping over (more embarassing than anything) while doing stupid stunts, etc: but I don't want this going off if I flip over my handlebars in slow motion at 3 MPH--which happens to me way more than being hit by a vehicle or other crash.
(I've crashed or been hit just about every way imaginable by now, where bicycles are concerned. It's why I gave up racing eventually.)
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Plus: The helmet doesn't have a "built in airbag", the product is an airbag. No helmet.
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It's in Pulp Fiction (the diner holdup scene), that explains why it didn't make sense.