Motorcycle Airbags Going Mainstream

There’s a peculiar pattern that’s repeated over and again in the field of motorcycle technology that sees pioneers widely ignored for years before hitting a tipping point that suddenly sees dozens of others scrambling to catch up with the same idea.

It happened with ABS brakes. BMW was there with the technology back in 1988 (although an aircraft-based Maxaret antilock system had been trialed as early as 1958 on a Royal Enfield in the UK). Two decades later, in 2008, there were still just six bikes on the market in the US with ABS as standard. But the snowball was about to start rolling. By 2012 there were 40 bikes with standard ABS and another 44 models with it as an option, and in 2022 the IIHS listed 325 different models of motorcycle available in the US with ABS. That’s most of the bikes on the market, and for the majority, ABS is standard fit rather than optional. It’s a similar story elsewhere, and in Europe it’s been a legal requirement for several years that new bikes over 125cc must have antilock as standard.

Other safety technologies like traction control have followed a similar pattern. Honda introduced TC on the ST1100 as long ago as 1992 to a wall of apathy, but over the last decade or so it’s become a must-have for new models. Now another safety tech—the on-bike airbag—may be on the verge of a similarly meteoric rise in fortunes.

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Airbags have been available on the last two generations of Honda Gold Wing, having been introduced as an option for the 2006 model year, though the same idea hasn’t spread to other models. But now it looks like at least one mass-market motorcycle or scooter will be equipped with an airbag for the 2025 model year. Autoliv—one of the globe’s largest suppliers of automotive safety equipment—has announced that its airbag will appear on a bike for the first time in the 2025 model year, starting production in the first quarter of that year.

Mikael Bratt, CEO and president of Autoliv, said: “Autoliv is committed to our vision of Saving More Lives and to providing world-class life-saving solutions for mobility and society. Therefore, we are developing products that specifically protect vulnerable road users, such as riders of powered two-wheelers. The development of these products is an integral part of our sustainability agenda.”

Although Autoliv hasn’t revealed what bike the airbag will initially be used on, the company inked a deal with Piaggio in 2021 to develop motorcycle airbags, and last year Piaggio quietly showed an airbag-equipped prototype based on the MP3 scooter at the EICMA show. With Aprilia, Vespa, and Moto Guzzi among its brands, Piaggio is well placed to spread airbags across a broad range of models if there’s the demand.

We spoke to Autoliv’s head of technology, mobile safety solutions, Atsushi Ishii, about the airbag project and the company’s hopes for the system. He explained how Autoliv’s airbags work and the scenarios where they’re most likely to save lives. In terms of components, the systems aren’t that different to the ones used in all modern cars.

“We need a crash sensor,” Ishii said, “We need a detection ECU, we need a harness and we need an airbag module. So it’s not that different to a car. However, one of the trickiest things on a motorcycle is that on a car you have a crash deformation cell… So you don’t have to be super quick. On a motorcycle, you don’t have the crash deformation, so you need to have really, really good algorithms in order to trigger the airbag fast.”

The airbag itself is mounted below the bars and, like car airbags, uses an electrically triggered chemical reaction to inflate rapidly. Although the use-case scenarios are relatively limited—essentially, the Autoliv bags, like those on the Honda Gold Wing, are focused purely on crashes where a car pulls out in front of a bike—that’s because these are the types of accident where there are the most immediate gains to be made in terms of safety.

“When we were showcasing this solution at EICMA, we actually had a motorcycle manufacturer ask, ‘Why are you pursuing this? This is only maybe 10 percent of all the crash cases,’” Ishii said, “Yes, it is, but if you are that rider, and you have a head-on collision and it saves your life, I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy you had the system.

“We need to start somewhere, so we are starting with the position that we know can save the most lives, and it will creep down to other cases, side impact, lowsides, highsides, and other crashes. You can make a comparison to cars. In the beginning they had the airbag on the steering wheel, but today you have side curtains, everything. The motorcycle business needs to make the same journey.”

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To develop the motorcycle airbag, Autoliv has had to create modified crash test dummies—motorcycle-specific dummies don’t exist—and test their ideas both in simulations and in full-scale crash tests. The results are stark. Looking at the Head Injury Criterion (HIC)—a set of measurements designed to work out the risk of head injuries—a crash without an airbag into the side of a car at 31 mph gave a result of 6,794 against a target of 500. With the airbag, the HIC dropped to 118, well below the danger zone. Head deceleration dropped from 130 G to 51 G, against a target of 72 G. The risks of neck injuries in the same crash scenario were also substantially reduced.

Initially, Autoliv’s intention is to get airbags onto small-capacity motorcycles and scooters. Again, that’s because this is the area where the most benefits will be felt. Head injuries are particularly common in markets like China and India, where helmet use may be lower and there’s a high density of small-capacity bikes in urban settings, at risk of the sort of crashes where airbags are most effective. The design of the bikes also influences their suitability to airbag technology: If you sit upright well back from the bars and the front wheel, there’s simply more time and space between you and the point of impact, giving a bigger window for the airbag to operate in.

Ishii told us: “We know we can put this on a cheap scooter. We can put it on a 125. I think the trickiest ones are powersport motorcycles, the Yamaha R1 and things like that, because you’re basically sitting on the tank, or leaning toward the tank. But except for supersport bikes, our research shows we can put on an airbag and make a big difference.” When it comes to sportbikes, he said: “We will solve it, but it’s not the first approach right now.”

Once the Autoliv airbag reaches a production bike in 2025, the company expects it to take around five years for the idea to be adopted on a mass scale. That ties in with the company’s target, across both cars and motorcycles, to save 100,000 lives each year by 2030. Now Autoliv’s products are reckoned to save around 35,000 lives per year.

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On-bike airbags are just one part of the company’s motorcycle safety strategy. Autoliv has also developed airbag-equipped vests—a technology that’s much more familiar—and recently tied in with helmet maker Airoh to create a prototype in-helmet airbag. This inflates in the event of a crash to form an additional layer of impact absorbance above the visor. The idea is to create a holistic safety system to help substantially reduce motorcycle-related deaths. However, the on-bike airbag has perhaps the biggest role to play because it’s there when it’s needed even if the rider has chosen not to wear protective clothing.

You only have to look at the relatively sudden widespread adoption of ABS in recent years, even though it had been available on some bikes for decades, to see the arc that airbags could follow. Autoliv’s system promises to be cheap, making it viable on scooters and in markets like India and China, while being compact and simple enough to allow manufacturers to add the technology without substantially reengineering their bikes. An extra layer of safety, even one you hope never to need, should be an easy sell if the price is low enough.