You ought to try being in a sinking yacht way out in the Pacific. Three days & nights in slow motion -though funnily enough I suddenly was able to do without sleep!
The trouble with any testing standard is that it can never truly create every possible real world scenario and creates a situation where manufacturers design ‘to pass the test’ at in the most cost effective way. Of course we need testing of some kind - without it we would be overrun with cheap products that fall apart as we slide down the road. But we also need to be aware of the flaws and limitations of the tests. There’s plenty of discussion out there on the subject - here’s one article that I found interesting https://www.motolegends.com/reviews/Why-we-don-t-really-rate-the-Sharp-helmet-test I have posted about it the following before but it’s worth mentioning again. I attended a motorcycle training day at Cadwell Park several years ago and there was an Accident Investigator there to give a safety talk. He described a fatal accident he had attended where a guy had come off his bike at 30mph and was killed because the thermoplastic shell of his helmet broke apart as he tumbled down the road. The helmet came off his head because it had lost structural integrity - even though the strap was still done up when they retrieved it. They found him propped up against a low driveway wall - looking like he was unharmed and just asleep. But even though he had lost most of his momentum by the time he came up against the wall - he had hit the back of his his head. Had he still had his helmet on he would have been fine as the impact wasn’t particularly hard. The advice of the Investigator was always buy a helmet that has a fibre based shell - doesn’t matter which kind of fibre. Because plastic cracks on impact - and the right sequence of impacts can break the shell apart. Fibres will crush but hold the helmet together - keeping that all important impact absorbing liner on your head. I doubt anyone who has seen this guy’s presentation ever bought a plastic shelled helmet again. It’s worth noting that the aim of helmet design isn’t just to protect your head from 1 sort of trauma - you could build a helmet so strong it could stand up to being run over by a tank. But it would be ridiculously heavy, and so rigid that even a relatively mild impact would cause your brain to be bounced around your skull like a pinball. Your skull would be intact but the brain damage could still kill you. So there’s a compromise to be made in helmet design - between weight, cost, rigidity of shell, and density of liner. There’s isn’t a helmet that’s perfect for every kind of accident. There is a school of thought, that focusing too much importance on testing high speed impact performance results in a helmet that is too rigid, with a liner that is too dense to properly absorb low velocity impacts. High end FIM race helmets have thicker shells and denser liner material because they are designed to protect racers from high a speed impacts. The same helmet in a low speed impact could result in concussion or worse for the wearer because it’s too rigid to absorb the lower velocity impact effectively. The new EC standard tries to take some of the criticisms of the current tests - another good article here. https://www.motolegends.com/reviews/ECE-22-06-The-new-safety-standard-for-motorcycle-helmets
The Aussie coastguard carried me off on their shoulders & straight to the bar (whilst a few of them put hi power emergency pumps in the boat until it was repaired). Lucky definitely, famous not so much!
