Alpinestars Tech-Air 5 Plasma airbag vest

First thing. This is a vest you wear beneath your protective jacket. And we have always felt that this is where the airbag should be. It has never made sense to us to expose the airbag to the greater chance that it might get damaged by having it as the first item that comes into contact with the road, or whatever you hit, when you come off the bike. 

 

But the Plasma 5 is the first airbag we’ve come across that can be worn beneath a motorcycle jacket without making you look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. In fact, one you’ve removed the back protector from your jacket the Plasma 5 is going to be nigh on invisible to the outside world.

 

Unlike the old Tech-Air 5, it’s super-stretchy, and the Level 2 back protector, which incorporates a single deployment canister for a much lower profile will not be the giveaway that beneath your jacket there’s an airbag ready to leap in to action.

 

But what we particularly like about the Plasma 5 is the way it is contoured, particularly at the front. It sits longer on the back, although it’s still short enough to wear with a pair of jeans. At the front, the airbag is shaped to protect the chest, the ribs, the neck and the shoulders. But in the stomach area, in your core, there’s mesh panelling to allow the oncoming air to keep you cool, and to allow you to pump cooler blood around the body.

 

Now, as ever, everything is a compromise. Everything is a trade off. And so it has to be accepted that there are other airbags out there that offer more coverage of the body, and therefore more protection. And indeed Alpinestars themselves offer models like the Tech-Air 7 and the Tech-Air 10, but we would take the view that, for now, with the current level of technology that is available to us, the Plasma 5 hits that sweet spot between wearability and protection.

 

Unlike the standard Tech-Air 5, the Plasma 5 comes with three different switchable modes. There’s Street mode, there’s off-Road mode and there’s Race mode, the idea being that for most people this is going to be the one airbag that will cover every eventuality. 

 

Now if you’re a serious trackday aficionado, you might want to go for the Tech-Air 7 or Tech-Air 10. And if you live your two-wheeled life in the mud and the rough stuff you might want to go for the Tech-Air MX or the Tech-Air Off-Road, but for anybody who wants an airbag that is going to look out for them in most of the situations in which they might find themselves, the Plasma 5 is probably the answer.

 

The difference between the modes, obviously, is the configuration of the firing algorithm. In Off-Road mode, it won’t go off if in response to even quite aggressive changes in direction, or if you get a bit of air over the bumps, but it will still detect those changes that spell a hard landing. The Race mode will not fire up until you hit 60 kph as you filter on to the circuit, so if you accidentally drop the bike in the pit garage there won’t be a deployment. Street mode, as you would expect, is for road riding, but also for light gravel tracks. It is the most sensitive of the three modes; the bag will even deploy if you’re sat at the lights, and somebody hits you from behind.

 

One of the reasons the Plasma 5 is lighter and lower profile than some airbags is that it is fitted with just one gas canister.  But it is this that accounts for the fact that it also deploys faster. When the airbag does go off it inflates in between 25 and 50 milliseconds. That’s four times faster than the blink of an eye.

 

But here’s the thing, the airbag doesn’t just inflate when you hit something. It detects unusual movements such that it anticipates the accident, meaning that in most situations the airbag will be inflated before any collision. And it can do that because the algorithm monitors your progress 1000 times a second in response to the three accelerometers and gyroscopes that detect changes in direction.

 

When it goes off it stays fully inflated for five seconds, which should be enough given that the average accident has a duration of just two seconds. The bag then gradually deflates over a period of 60 seconds.

 

And what Alpinestars tells us is that where the airbag is deployed, and that includes most of the back as well as the chest, the neck and the shoulders, the impact on the body is reduced by 95%. By my calculations, that sounds like a twentieth of the force of an impact gets transmitted to the body!

 

In terms of protection for the spine, we have already mentioned that the Plasma 5 has a Level 2 back protector; what’s more it’s quite D3O-like in its construction, so is light and flexible. But when the airbag inflates it delivers protection to the spine equivalent to four standard, Level 1 protectors which, in my book, equates to two Level 2 protectors.

 

The other thing that Alpinestars has got right with the Plasma 5, in our view, is the cost, the charging structure, and the servicing. The cost is £699. Now that’s not cheap, but it’s a lot less than airbags used to cost.

 

And over time it’s going to work out far less than an airbag from Inner&Motion where you have to keep paying an annual subscription charge if you want to be supplied with updated algorithms and software. If you buy an airbag on this basis, it doesn’t take that long to find that you’ve paid over a grand. And even then there’s still no end in sight!

 

Back in the day, it was also quite a palaver, and quite an expense, to get your airbag checked over and re-equipped after a deployment. Well, there’s none of that malarkey with the Plasma 5. After a deployment you can change the canister yourself. A canister costs less than £100. And what Alpinestars tells us is that the airbag is good for up to six deployments before it needs to go back to what they call a ‘hub’ for a service, the charge for which would be £299.99. 

 

To set the Plasma 5 up you simply scan the QR code that’s attached to it, and register on the App. Now some people love Apps. But there are people who don’t live life through their phones. And so whilst there is an App., and whilst many people will find it invaluable, you don’t need it to be able to use the Plasma 5 on a daily basis. 

 

Yet the App. is still important. You’ll need it to update the software. The App. will also tell you when it’s time to send your vest off for servicing. There’s another benefit in the App. that’s called ‘Track Your Ride’. Now some people just like to geek out on things like this, but if you do have an accident this will tell you what was going on before it took place. Indeed you may even be able to prove that you were riding much slower than the guy who pulled out in front of you said you were travelling at. Or not!

 

The vest will charge up fully in four hours. Once it’s charged, it’s good for 30 hours of riding. If not used, the airbag should hold its charge for a couple of months. The App. will tell you what the charge status is.

 

When you put the jacket on, and zip it up, a sensor will vibrate to let you know it’s fired up, and ready to rock and roll. There’s a similar buzz when you take it off.

 

A set of LEDs that you can then toggle between will allow you to check on the status of the airbag, and to alter the riding modes.

 

Low profile as the Plasma 5 is, you should still only wear it beneath a jacket that declares itself to be ‘airbag ready’, or that has enough room to allow the airbag to inflate within it without doing you or the jacket damage. The advice was always to have about a golf ball’s worth of space inside the jacket. And that still holds true.

 

Now you would, logically, remove the back protector from any jacket you wore over the Plasma 5. You are still going to need elbow armour, because the Plasma 5 does not purport to offer any protection to your arms; only to your shoulders. But with the low profile nature of modern D3O-style armour, like Diablo, a case could still be made for still wearing your shoulder armour. It could come in handy if, for whatever reason the bag didn’t deploy and, of course, it would offer you limb protection if your airbag ran out of charge mid-ride.

 

It has been put to us that you might choose to still wear a chest protector. But we would see this as less about the absorption of the energy of an impact, and more about providing an extra barrier against penetration, which is not what airbags do.

 

If you do decide to wear a Plasma 5 it probably makes sense to carry with you a spare argon gas canister, especially if you are touring somewhere a long way from home. But if you decide to do this, and you’re flying somewhere, you will have to put the canister in your hold luggage, accompanied by the paperwork that can be downloaded from the Alpinestars App..

 

In terms of sizing, the airbag comes in eight sizes:. XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL and XXXXL. Clearly, Alpinestars believe this is enough sizes. Equally clearly they don’t feel that women require a different sizing matrix.

 

Finally, the warranty is two years, but before going ahead you should perhaps check, and make yourself comfortable with, what is incorporated within that warranty.