Modern Vespa

This can be a contentious topic, as any gear discussion would be. But that 1st video was created and primarily motivated by clicks and the monetary value associated with those clicks. As an ATG_ATT proponent, i prefer riding with good armor.

In my big crash of '21, I did suffer a broken upper left arm, broken ribs, and broken right hand while wearing armor. But the damage to my hip was limited to a large and nasty bruise; I likely would have broken my leg or hip (or both) without armor on my hip. My injuries would have been much more substantial without the armor in my gear. Head and feet were all ok - some might argue my head was already badly damaged

Armor has been proven to provide protection, otherwise the MotoGP racers wouldn't wear it. As with helmets, proper fit and placement is important to how it performs.

I did remove the back armor in my jacket and replaced it with an armored vest with better back protection and added chest protector. Alpine Stars developed this to be worn under a track suit and it easily fits under my RevIt riding jacket. CE2 chest and back protection.

https://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/alpinestars-nucleon-flex-pro-protection-vest

Where is my Non-Newtonian Fluid armour? Is this 2024 or what?

trying hitting your elbow to a wall with an armor on, than do that without.

Your answer will be there.

Did anyone catch the subtle nods to this video in F9's latest?

My experience riding dirt is
The more gear I wear, the faster I go & the more chances I take. More layers softens the blow & reduces the rash, Scrubbing out the dirt or picking out gravel sucks

I just don't ride with the same wild abandon on pavement, the danger on the street is more immediate, more acute, every incident potentially fatal.
I can usually manage full face, boots, covered arms, legs & hands. Armour is hot & bulky. I'll take my chances with a few deeper bruises.
I haven't seen any street gear that has actual shoulder protection like a dirt "chest protector" with shoulder cups & webbing suspension, that will save me from a busted collar bone, a little bit of foam won't do it

I don't watch anything on youtube, you're stuck with commercials every 2 minutes or a $70 monthly bill
Worst of all no accurate transcript, just idiots who like the sound of their own voice who feel like they have meaningful opinions we should care about [influncer noise]... I hate that companies feel like a few bad videos is a substitute for written documentation or a bad chatbot is customer service

Whenever I see someone arguing that PPE like helmets or body armour are a bad thing, I always ask "if I'm going to hit you with a sturdy object, would you want to be wearing the armour/helmet/etc or not?"

Or "run as fast as you can and throw yourself down on the pavement - or into a brick wall".

(For most of us that would only be about 15 MPH.)

Armour is like crumple zone in a car. It will not prevent accidents, it will not make injury impossible. All it does is reduce the severity of your injuries in case of a mishap.

Wait. You've seen people argue PPE is a bad thing? Who? Point them out. I want to see what their lives are like lol

Yup. Basically a summary of the Fortnine video.

It'll do enough to reduce bruising, scraping, etc. but not enough to prevent a bone from breaking, so it's up to every individual to make an informed decision on whether or not they would prefer to wear armor every day, or run the risk that they might one day go down and get bruising and scraping.

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1039.html

There's some very odd people out there.

Don't we have the exact same thing in motorcycling though? Don't DOT and other motorcycle helmet body's say the same thing and that's why stick on stuff on your helmets isn't kosher, because it could effect rotation in a crash which could lead to some nasty(er) results?

I don't see saying "in some instances, a helmet of this shape will help in this way, but in other instances, the same helmet could make things worse" is the same thing as a blank slate, "helmet = bad" statement.

Oh yeah, definitely picked up on that. It must have been a sh!t storm after that vid.

This is what the man said, yes.

It is not entirely true, though. At least over here, the standard impact protectors nowadays tend to be D3O stuff. It's a long time I've seen anything else, like those daft tiny sheets of soft material, that do indeed fit into the 'bruise protection category'.

What the very basic modern impact protectors do, in addition to providing some additional bruise and scrape protection, is that they both take away some of the impact force and even more importantly, distribute the force to a wider area. They do lessen the injuries caused by impacts - prevent small ones and reduce serious ones...with physical limits, of course.

It has to be said, that unfortunately basic protectors are not very good with twist and bend protection - and yes, it is often stated that these are common with bike accidents. In effect, it may be that a protector prevented your bone from being shattered into pieces, just to let it simply snap broken because of bending.

Still, wearing an impact protector can well be the difference between e.g. knee surgery or not - and true, it is indeed an informed (hopefully) personal decision whether to risk that or not.

Not trying to be a wiseass, I just think Fortnine vid cut corners just a bit too much to be informative for the masses

I agree.

They may not prevent long bone breaks, but they certainly can make the difference between a shattered knee, elbow, shoulder and "just" a bad bruise.

I have tested this myself.

100%. A lot of people only look at the thumbnail (designed to stir a response), watch an arbitrary minute or so of footage, don't look at the nuance and the particular words chosen across the entire video, and simply face dive to an opinion.

"ThE tHuMbNaIl SaId GeAr = BaD, sO tHe WhOle ViDeO mUsT sAy BaD!"
- Idiot logic

Props to whoever this John guy is for taking the time to create his own piece, presenting his own position, rather than just being another anonymous neckbeard crying in the comments

I watched the whole video. The "idiot logic" was Ryan's.

It's weird you would even defend it. It's like you've gone all Lance Stroll or something.

Indeed. Just tortured myself reading responses to a photo of a scratched/crashed helmet on FB. It veered off into people insisting its better to be ejected in a car crash because they know of someone who was ejected and lived. And, well, you know helmet discussions in general.

So ... playing Devil's advocate here. And this is firsthand information.

When I was 15, my little brother, then 11, was on his way to the corner store on his bike. This was 1985. He was hit from behind by a very large automobile, was thrown from his bike backward and struck the base of his skull on the bottom corner of the windshield hard enough to crack the glass. He spent seven weeks in a coma and seven months in a rehab facility before he came home with a feeding tube in his nose. A lot of things changed for us in 1985.

Derek survived, worked hard, moved out on his own to Minneapolis and now resides in his own home in somewhere in Iowa. He has had lifelong physical handicaps that - at 50 - are really starting to take their toll. But he was able to drive, never lost any of his mental faculties and has done pretty well for himself.

The point is, the doctor told us at the time because of the nature of the accident and the injury, if he HAD been wearing a helmet it's very likely the accident would have killed him. Nobody can be 100% sure, and this is definitely an outlier, but odds are almost never zero.

I still wore my ECE2206 lid on my 50cc scooter this morning.

What I got from this video was that armour is a good thing but because of the adoption of a very poor standard, many equipment manufacturers are meeting this very low standard, providing the minimum armour that they can get away with but they can still claim to meet the industry standard. As a result, the consumer has no idea of the relative merits of a certain armour and the author is debunking the "standardized armour is good armour" thinking.

I don't know what that means. I only watch good racing lol

He's another puzzlingly atypical Canadian.

Is it possible you just don't talk to a lot of Canadians under 40? lol

I worked with a bunch of Canadians (mostly under 40) at Apple. None of them were jerks.

Canada has given us great bands like Rush, Crash Test Dummies and Recess Monkeys. They also make good beer and have their own special bacon. They've contributed great things to society, such as hockey, the snowblower, plexiglass, Easy Off oven cleaner, poutine and the Wonderbra.

I have nothing but good things to say about the great nation of Canada. I, for one, am willing to give Ryan a pass on this one.

So, the next time you use your trusty caulk gun or your life is saved by your explosive vapor detector, make sure you shoot a smile and a wave to our northern neighbors. Thanks, Canada.

Grateful for Shatner, SCTV, Rick Danko, Molsen Golden, Sloan, David Cronenberg. I could go on. But this guy who says the armor is pointless? I'm less grateful for him.

Who said armor is pointless?

From the video:

FFS, give it up already. The title of the video was "Why I Stopped Wearing Motorcycle Body Armour". It was obviously meant to be controversial, the reasoning presented was poor AT BEST, and your continued defense of this turd of a video just makes us all question your own reasoning facilities.

Ryan started to lose me a bit when he started building the advertisements right into the videos. To hear him talk about something he's being paid to promote with the exact same authoritative and hilarious tone he brings to the rest of the video diminishes it all for me. Still a first-ballot YouTube Hall of Famer, just not the amazing outlier he once seemed to be.

Gauging by the general response to this thing, not just MY take, the majority of people who look at that video hear "armor is pointless". All or nothing. You could argue that he meant something different. You do actually know the man.

But this was a well-crafted announcement. Advertisement? Warning? You pick. If he didn't want "armor is pointless" to be the takeaway he coulda crafted it differently.

But that wouldn't have resulted in nearly as much YouTube Engagement Juice.

...or MV Engagement Juice.

I rewatched the video to get a better handle on what was actually said after all the chatter. The first time I watched the video I saw it as an extension of Ryan's other videos questioning gear via the standards by which they are made. It just seemed to be another "Are the standards really good enough?" video. On the second time through, I'm convinced the same thing.

Did he perhaps go a little far by saying he's taking his armor out? Maybe. We all know there are those out there who will immediately say, "If it's good enough for Ryan, it's good enough for me." That's dangerous.

But what I appreciated was this bit :

Paul says the standard for motorcyclist limb joint impact protectors set unadventurous requirements but were what the industry supported. Remember that. The explanation was that the standards requirements were minimum. Manufacturers were free to develop higher performing products. The actuality is that in the mass Market where price point is critical there was and is little or no ambition or incentive to do better than the standard.

Again, what I took from the video, and I hope a lot of others did, is question the standards and what they mean. I've said it before, I've been in industry measurements and standards in the automotive industry for the majority of my life. I know how standards work. I know how testing works. I know how manufacturing works and I know very well how quality assurance works. And maybe that's my bias while watching the video, too, because I know they could all be better.

I am in no way going to take my armor out, because - like everyone else - I realize some armor is better than no armor. I mean, if it's truly pointless, let's all ride around in shorts and flip flops. Most people know better.

I'm not apologizing or defending the video or the statements in the video, because it's Ryan's videos questioning standards that had me re-evaluate my own gear and buy better gear. He has educated people on standards, what they mean and how that applies to their personal safety. And it opened a great discussion in the comments thread below the video. And I will continue shaking my fist at industries people rely on who could do better if they weren't all racing to the bottom on cost and maximizing profit. I know, I know ... a lot of that is market driven. That's a whole different discussion.

So, my 2¢.

MV Engagement Juice doesn't pay anything, and so very few people are silly enough to prioritize for it.

If we are going partisan maybe he's not worried about fractures because he has access universal healthcare🤔

Edit: Is there a difference between armour (hard) and padding (soft)
. Hey I resemble that remark.

OK not flip flops/thongs/jandals but that is a fashion thing and I don't live near a beach.

It has been 100F+ for a few weeks now. It is like riding into a hair dryer. So cargo shorts and loafers on the way to the pub.

iirc on this forum helmet laws are controversial and hence discussion of that topic is forbidden. but somebody pointing out that [the majority of] pads/armour are not as effective as many assume is a fine topic.

But we can talk about helmet safety and standards all day long without getting into laws and government and politics. Safety is safety, politics are politics.

Fair enough, i see you point.

You do make a fair point, though. It would be easy for this topic to wind up in deep water. Thanks for helping keep it in check.

You would be surprised, actually. The topic of helmet laws (in particular) tends to incite political BS. I wouldn't have guessed it, but there you go.

And that's why we can't have nice things.

AFAIK, the subject of Toreador Pants (and other armor-related topics) has never drifted toward politics.