Wearing an airbag in the hottest weather. Does it really make sense?

We were one of the very first retailers in the UK to offer an airbag vest. We came across Helite at the Paris motorcycle show at a time when they were still trying to convince the world that their experience in the equestrian market could be transferred to motorcycling. But we didn't work with them for long. We found their vests to be simply too heavy and cumbersome. But I suspect that we also weren't all that enamoured by the look and what, back then, an airbag said about a rider.

For us motorcycling was, and is, about freedom; about a sense of escape; about shaking off the shackles of everyday life. Back then wearing a huge, conspicuous airbag made one feel as though as though you had been dressed by an overly cautious mum who wanted to make sure that you couldn't come to any harm when you were allowed out of the house for a few hours.

And so for over 15 years we simply didn't offer airbags. Yes, we admit that we didn’t really like the look. We perhaps also found ourselves a little put off by the smug, virtue-signalling attitude of those who wore their bright yellow vests like a badge of honour. But more importantly we were always concerned about the impact airbags could have on one's ability to control the bike.

To ride well we need to be in a comfortable and relaxed state. We need to be able to move freely, and to react swiftly when the circumstances demand it. Wearing close to three kilos of airbag on your back kind of got in the way of that ideal, we felt.

But it was an airbag's potential to cause you to overheat that always instilled in us the greatest concern.

By definition airbags are not breathable. They are basically constructed around an airtight bag. And that's a problem because in all conditions, but particularly in hot ones, we need to be able to sweat effectively. And you cannot sweat effectively if what you’re wearing close to your body is airtight, and therefore the total opposite of breathable.

Our customers will be bored to death of hearing me bang on about how sweating is the body's natural mechanism for cooling itself down. But sweating is not just about the wet stuff coming to the surface of your skin. You don't cool down just because you're covered in sweat.

For you to start cooling down that sweat has to turn into a vapour and escape into the ether. It's a process that, technically, is known as 'evaporative cooling'. The transition of your sweat in its liquid form into a gaseous one, requires energy. Energy is heat, and when our liquid sweat becomes a vapour the heat that it took to bring about that transition is pulled from the body. And so we cool down.

Now anything that gets in the way of this process will impede the sweating process. And anything that does will prevent the body from cooling down in the way it wants to. The sweat will stay as a liquid. We won't cool down. We'll just get hotter. Ultimately, with more and more sweat coming to the surface of the skin we will start to dehydrate. And if that goes on for too long, we can end up in trouble.

Remember, getting a bit clammy and sweaty is not the issue here. The problem has nothing to do with feeling a tad uncomfortable. What we are trying to avoid here is becoming dehydrated; on the bike dehydration can be a killer. And you don’t need to lose a lot of liquid for your concentration to be affected. One of the first things to suffer when we become dehydrated is our visual-motor coordination; and on a motorbike that’s pretty important it seems to us.

Now when we are sweating profusely, say in really hot weather, the worst thing to be wearing is anything with a waterproof membrane. As I have mentioned, when anything gets in the way of our sweat turning into a vapour we will get hotter. And that's exactly what a membrane will do.

Likewise leather garments, even perforated ones, will be problematic in this regard.

But next up in the hierarchy of things not to wear when it's really hot is an airbag vest.

Wear an airtight airbag and you will make it harder for ‘evaporative cooling’ to take place. That’s just a fact.

Of course, the very worst thing to do is wear an airbag vest in hot weather over a waterproof or leather jacket. Do this and you have made your life a whole lot less pleasant. And potentially a whole lot more dangerous.

And so we reach a position where we might suggest that, whilst an airbag vest could protect you in an accident, there’s a very real danger that, in the very hottest of conditions, an airbag worn in conjunction with items of clothing that also don't breathe, could actually serve to make it more likely that you’ll have an accident in the first place.

Now clearly we are not saying that you shouldn’t wear an airbag. That’s very much a personal choice. But what we are saying is that you need to give very serious thought as to whether, in the kind of weather we’ve seen in Europe this summer, it will always make sense to wear one.

Given, as we have explained, that the real issue here is dehydration the other take-out is that, in the kind of conditions we're talking about, you simply need to stop a lot more often. And take on a lot more liquid.

What is so dangerous about heat exhaustion, which is what we are trying to avoid, and which comes about as a consequence of becoming dehydrated, is that we tend not to know that we’re suffering from it. It creeps up on us. But by the time it makes itself known, we are in trouble!

An airbag for the hottest conditions

Until recently the evolution of the airbag seemed to be based on providing ever increasing levels of protection, spread across ever larger areas of the body.

And this, for us, seemed wrong. It just wasn't joined-up thinking, and it seemed to be ignorant of the real demands involved in piloting a motorcycle.

It felt as though the manufacturers had got themselves into a competition to outdo one another. It’s always easy to add more to a product, but nobody seemed to be giving much thought to the impact that making airbags bigger and heavier had on the rider. There seemed to be a somewhat unquestioning acceptance that more was necessarily better.

And certainly all those virtue-signalling social media influencers looking to increase their subscriber numbers seemed to fall over themselves in their eagerness to report on just how much added protection a new airbag model offered over the one that went before.

Our views put us at loggerheads with the folk at Bennetts Social who, as reviewers often do, seemed to prefer the lack of ambiguity that comes from comparing product spec. sheets and assigning scores. And one can see that for people drawn to such simplistic analyses a larger more encompassing airbag will always appear to win out over a smaller, lighter one that offers less coverage.

But that’s just not the way we see it.

Motorcycling should not be reduced to the relentless pursuit of ever higher levels of protection. If, for you, that’s what motorcycling is all about, then frankly you might feel safer trading in your two wheels for four, because bikes are inherently dangerous whatever you wear.

Now having snubbed airbags for so long, it was only the arrival of the Alpinestars Tech Air 5 Plasma that caused us to reassess our thinking.

Here was an airbag sculpted to the rib cage such that it allowed cool air to enter the core and other parts of the torso in the interest of keeping the rider cool. We were in no doubt when we took it on, and are in no doubt now some 12 months later, that this the most wearable, most breathable airbag on the market. Indeed, in our book, it’s still the only one out there that appears prepared to overtly sacrifice protection in the interest of comfort and wearability.

Predictably it was savaged by Bennetts, who seemed not be able to come to terms with the lack of coverage it offered; their assessment, made worse in my view, by their almost total lack of understanding as to what actually makes the Tech Air 5 Plasma so breathable.

Now clearly everybody is entitled to an opinion. Ours is shaped by the hundreds of conversations we have with customers here in the shop every single week. That doesn’t necessarily make us right, of course, but in our book there needs to be consideration given to what might be deemed an ‘appropriate’ level of impact protection.

For more than half the amount of time that motorcycles have been on the road nobody wore what might be termed protective clothing. Marlon Brando didn’t wear a leather jacket because he thought it offered him more protection; he just thought it made him look cool!

From the eighties on armour became a thing. And over the years it has got better; becoming ever more protective whilst at the same time lighter. The new millennium has seen the rise of the airbag, although even now less than 1% of motorcyclists wear one.

But we take the view that if an airbag that is as light and easy to wear as the Tech Air 5 can reduce the energy of an impact on the body by up to 95% there has to come a point where, with the current state of technology, that has to be considered sufficient for your average road rider.

It is no secret that other airbags offer more protection; indeed a number of them also come from Alpinestars. But if you are looking for some of the extra reassurance that an airbag offers, but in a package where the trade offs in terms of wearability, comfort and breathability are minimal, there’s no airbag out there right now that comes close to the Tech Air 5 Plasma.

And there is evidence that this 'less is more' approach is going to become the direction of travel for airbags in the future. We have seen next year’s offerings from more one of the leading names in this market. And what we can tell you is that some of them are going to offer even higher levels of breathability than the Plasma, albeit in some instances at the expense of even less coverage of the body.

Airbags, as we have suggested, have to date flopped from an adoption and commercial standpoint. The vast majority of bikers just aren't interested in them. And that's largely because most riders simply don't relish the prospect of actually riding in one.

And so the manufacturers are going to have to weigh up the viability of producing ever more protective airbags that nobody wants to wear against the potential of producing lighter, more comfortable and more breathable, albeit less protective, airbags that riders are actually prepared to ride in.

In a short period of time, the hugely popular Tech Air 5 Plasma, the most popular and fastest selling airbag of all time, has surely shown us that, as a philosophy, 'less is more' is the way to go.

Where do we get to?

On one level, it's all very simple.

When it's really hot, by which we mean temperatures approaching and exceeding 30 degrees, we need to be prioritising breathability when it comes to dressing for the ride. That's not at the expense of protection, obviously, but in such temperatures maintaining the ability of our bodies to stay cool becomes a critical consideration. And it's critical because if we overheat for too long we put ourselves in the way of danger.

When it's really hot out there you need to be wearing the right gear. And ideally that means ditching the waterproof stuff; the same goes for leather gear.

Given the importance of breathability and the need for evaporative cooling to take place, we need to think seriously about wearing anything else that gets in the way. And clearly an airbag will get in the way.

Now we will all need to weigh up a number of factors and and potentially conflicting demands.

How hot is it going to be? How hard will I be working on the bike? And for how long will I be in the saddle? Will the screen on my bike block any airflow? How can I stay on top of my liquid intake? Do I really need to be wearing my waterproof jacket? Why am I riding in a leather jacket? How important to me is protection, and do I think the standard armour in my jacket is going to be enough given the riding I will be doing?

What we can say without fear of contradiction is that if you add an airbag in to the equation when there’s already a danger of overheating, you will only make the situation worse, such that there comes a point where you have to ask yourself whether wearing an airbag is the right thing to do.

For now, though, what we can also say is that if you do elect to wear an airbag in the kind of conditions we're talking about, then it's the Alpinestars Tech Air 5 Plasma that's going to have less impact on the ability of your body to regulate its temperature than any other airbag currently on the market.

It may not offer the greatest coverage of your body but, in extremis, it may well increase your chances of making it home in one piece.

That's for now. Down the road there will be other airbags from other manufacturers that will tread the same fine line that the Tech Air 5 Plasma does. And we know that because we've seen some of them.

Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to see a trend that will actually cause more people to decide to wear an airbag. And we have no issues with that.

For more information and to view online, click Alpinestars Tech-Air 5 Plasma airbag vest.