Jump to: navigation, search CMS Helmets is a Portuguese brand of motorcycle helmet owned by CMS Helmets - Fabrica de Capacetes. This brand is sold globally and is sponsor of motorcycle races in Portugal and abroad.Since its founding in 1957, the Snell Memorial Foundation has independentlyIts first safety standards for protective headgear were issued for auto racing in 1959. helmet standards for motorcycling, equestrian sports, bicycling, rollerblading and skateboarding, snowboarding and skiing, and karting have been issued. These standards address performance, not specific materials or design. Periodically, utilizing specially designed test equipment, the Foundation upgrades its specifications on performance characteristics of helmets to keep pace with advances in materials, helmet technology and design.Apparently an 80s commerical for the helmet manufacturer Bell bore the slogan: "If you've got a $10 head, wear a $10 helmet". Nowadays it's a deeply-ingrained

and widely accepted idea among bikers that it's worth spending a lot of money on your headgear. A top-of-the-line Arai can sell for almost four figures, particularly if you want a nice design, but what are you getting for your money and, in particular, is it any safer than a helmet you pickup for a tenth of that price? There are various minimum safety standards for bike helmets. Snell and DOT, whereas the UK requires the snappily named or the European standard, ECE22.05, apparently equivalent to the US DOT. But these are minimum standards that manufacturers must design towards, as such they don't help differentiating between ratified helmets. In the UK, an impartial government safety scheme has been set up with its own forced acronym (the Safety Helmet Assessment and Rating Programme, SHARP) to try to scientifically assess how protective helmets are in simulated crash-like tests, designed using real-world data. Take a look at this neat animation

They condense the data from 32 tests over seven replicates into a simple 5-star rating, with 5 star helmets said to provide "good levels of protection right around the helmet". As of April 2014, their database contains a total of 328 helmet models, a decent set of results for some further analysis.used 1999 fatboy motorcycles for sale A good starting point is to look at the spread of helmet prices, identifying the premiummotorcycle dealers in eureka ca brands and the cheapies that have been tested by SHARP.fiberglass motorcycle helmet safety We can see why Bell might be keen to push the idea that we all need expensive helmets!bmw motorcycle dealer southampton

Helmets in the dataset are spit into two categories: full-face and "system". far as I can tell the latter refer to what I would call "flip-front" helmets. These have a hinged jaw section which you can raise either to use as an open-face helmet or more commonly so as to pay for your petrol without scaring the cashier.honda motorcycle dealers in albuquerque new mexico I'm not aware this has been conclusively proven but the general feeling among bikersbest motorcycle route from florida to sturgis seems to be that a flip-front helmet offers less protection than a more rigid full-face. Does the SHARP data agree? There is a greater proportion of top-rated full-face helmets, and the most common rating for flip-front lids is 3 stars, compared to 4 for full-face.

full-face helmets dominate the dataset (86% of helmets tested by SHARP), and most brands will only produce a couple of flip models, save the specialists like The main question to be answered with this dataset is: are more expensive helmets more protective, and if so to what degree? Overall yes, there's a non-zero linear regression coefficient that suggests each additional £ spent on a helmet returns 2 × 10-4 SHARP rating points. worth noting that this trend explains a measly 6% of the variance in helmet ratings and, more interestingly, the y-intercept is a fairly decent 3.1 rating, suggesting there are some cheap but highly rated helmets in the dataset. We can break this relationship trend down by manufacturer: There are some striking differences here. Entry brands like Nitro seem good examples of where a higher outlay is likely to result in significantly betterThe Arai premium brand, however, has little relationship between

price and protection, with most of their range scoring the same 3 out of 5 rating. You'll notice the points in these graphs have been jittered to prevent them all stacking at the integer ratings, and give the illusion of a (preferable) continuous rating. At this point any statisticians reading may criticise the use of linear regression here (on unjittered values, of course), as the rating system is really an ordinal variable and so would be better suited to something like an ordered logit model. With these caveats in mind I won't overinterpret the above linear models. So to finish, two important questions: what are the best/worst value for money helmets, and which brands overall output the most protective and reasonably priced lids? Here I'm plotting the mean SHARP rating across each brand's tested helmets, against their median helmet price which were then ranked 1 to 22, with 22 being the most expensive brand on average. Grey rectangles indicate both the cheapest third of brands,