Whether you walk away alive from a motorcycle crash depends on knowing how to choose certified protective equipment (airbags, helmets, protectors and apparel).

We often hear that speed kills, yet MotoGP riders crash at more than 150 km/h and walk away unharmed. This is thanks to certified protective equipment. Wearing this equipment can reduce the severity of injuries in a crash by more than 90%. However, the market is flooded with poor-quality counterfeits passed off as certified protective gear. In this article, we explain a simple three-step procedure to check the quality of a piece of protective equipment and avoid being cheated by counterfeits that could cost you your life.

Without a doubt, the most counterfeited marking in the world is the European Conformity (CE) mark, which indicates compliance with EU legislation on health, safety and sustainability. This high counterfeiting rate is because Chinese manufacturers created the "China Export" mark, which imitates the official CE logo to confuse consumers with poor-quality products. The only difference between the two logos is the spacing between the letters, which is imperceptible. If a seller of protective equipment only mentions the CE marking, be on your guard: you are very likely looking at a counterfeit.

Types of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Protective equipment for motorcyclists falls into two categories: 1) equipment that saves lives, and 2) equipment that reduces joint injuries or prevents skin lacerations.

The most important is the equipment that can save lives, that is, the equipment that protects vital organs from serious or fatal trauma. This category includes motorcycle airbags, which protect the vital organs of the neck, chest and abdomen, and helmets, which protect the brain.

At the second level is equipment that reduces injuries but does not protect any vital organ and therefore does not save lives: apparel, upper-limb protectors (shoulders, elbows and gloves) and lower-limb protectors (knee protectors and boots).

Choosing the wrong vital-organ protector, such as an airbag or a helmet, can cost a motorcyclist their life, which is why it is so important not to be misled. To avoid this, we describe a simple three-step process for tracing the equipment's certification. The three things to check are: the standard, the laboratory that issues the certification, and the document.

1. The certification standard

Because of their importance, we will focus on the standards for life-saving protective equipment: motorcycle airbags and helmets.

For motorcycle airbags, tracing certification is very easy: there is only one standard developed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to certify motorcycle airbags, and it is EN 1621-4.

The EN 1621 standard currently has four parts. Part 4 (inflatable protectors) covers the testing of mechanically activated airbag systems; work is already under way on EN 1621-5, dedicated to electronically activated airbags. Since Part 5 does not yet exist, to date no electronically activated airbag holds a certification based on a CEN standard. The reliability failures reported by users of electronically activated airbags (a high number of unintended deployments, or failures to deploy in a crash) are an additional challenge for the team working on the new standard.

However, even though it has offered guarantees to consumers since 2013 (a pass threshold for impact attenuation, and the fact that it cannot be changed unilaterally, as happens with private protocols), EN 1621-4 is not currently the standard most widely adopted by manufacturers — not even by those producing mechanically activated motorcycle airbags, which could be tested against it.

Let's look at the case of Spain. In that country, certified motorcycle airbags are sold through three different routes, and almost nobody knows it: not the buyer and, often, not even the seller. This catalog, compiled by the Spanish National Association of Two-Wheeler Companies (ANESDOR) and the Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT), shows that only three of the longest-established brands in the airbag market (AIROBAG, HIT-AIR and MOTOAIRBAG) certify their inflatable protectors under the European standard EN 1621-4, while the vast majority do so through a private test protocol, AMC-013, written by a French laboratory. Both routes allow the product to be sold legally throughout the European Union, but they are not equivalent.

The problem is not legality: it is that the two routes do not require the same thing, and no label explains this to the buyer.

To understand the difference between EN 1621-4 and AMC-013, imagine two exams for the same airbag. In both, a five (5) kg mass is dropped from just over one metre onto the inflated vest. The impact is identical in both cases: same mass, same height, same drop force. So far, everything is the same.

The difference lies in the question each exam asks. The European standard places a sensor underneath the vest and asks: how much force reached the body? Its limit, at its most demanding level, is three (3) kilonewtons (kN = unit of force).

The French protocol places the sensor on the falling mass itself and asks: how much was that mass slowed down? Its limit, expressed in g, is 500 g, which — converted to the same unit (kN) using a basic physics formula anyone can check — equals 24.5 kN.

In other words, at its most demanding level the European exam requires transmitted force not to exceed three (3) kN, while the French protocol allows up to eight times more. To put this in perspective: the European standard for back protectors, EN 1621-2, tested at the same impact energy (50 J), does not allow any single blow above 24 kN at Level 1, the lowest level of protection, and also requires the average of all blows to stay below 18 kN. The AMC-013 protocol accepts up to 24.5 kN equivalent per blow for an inflated airbag and sets no limit on the average. Its pass threshold is therefore even less demanding than that of a conventional Level 1 back protector. The whole point of wearing an airbag is to protect the vital organs in the neck and chest with greater impact attenuation than conventional chest and back protectors provide, so using airbags held to a lower requirement than those protectors makes no sense.

It seems intuitive that an airbag meeting the highest European requirement of EN 1621-4 would also pass the French exam, and by a wide margin. Conversely, passing the French exam says nothing about whether the same airbag would pass the European one, given the large gap between their acceptance thresholds.

A necessary clarification: we are not saying that airbags certified under the French protocol are unsafe, or that their sale is irregular, since that certification is issued by a notified body. But it seems clear that the AMC-013 protocol is a less demanding route than EN 1621-4 to comply with Regulation (EU) 2016/425 on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the category motorcycle airbags fall under. Today, buyers of a certified airbag are not being properly informed about the difference between these two routes and what it implies.

It is not right for two exams with such different acceptance thresholds to be presented as equivalent.

Now let's talk about motorcycle helmets.

Helmets are among the most counterfeited items in the world of industrial safety; however, there is only one reliable certification standard for motorcycle helmets: the ECE 22.06 technical regulation. Any other helmet standard, such as DOT (FMVSS 218), or the national technical standards of Japan, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay or any other country, is not equally reliable.

Since 1972, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has periodically updated UN Regulation No. 22 (R22), the best global standard for motorcycle helmets. Its latest version is known as UN ECE R22.06, or simply ECE 22.06, and this is the one a safety-conscious motorcyclist should choose.

A practical tip: before buying a helmet, check that it has a sewn-in approval label showing an "E" with the country number in a circle, an approval number starting with 06, and a serial number.

Although the United Nations encourages all its member states to adopt R22, there are still many national technical standards that differ from one another but share one thing: they are considerably less demanding than R22.06.

The US standard FMVSS 218, popularly known as DOT, deserves special attention: it is an honour system, in which the helmet manufacturer itself declares compliance, without an independent laboratory certifying it. Since the US Department of Transportation (DOT) does not enforce compliance outside its territory, an unscrupulous trader can put a DOT (FMVSS 218) marking on any helmet that does not meet it and face no penalty.

In short, for life-saving protective equipment (helmets and airbags), the two most reliable standards are ECE 22.06 and EN 1621-4.

2. The laboratory

As we saw in the section on impact protectors, only the European Union has, worldwide, structured and reliable standards for testing protective equipment. To make sure these standards are properly applied, the EU created a network of independent bodies to assess the conformity of products before they are placed on the market. These bodies are known as Notified Bodies (NB) and act as assessment laboratories in critical sectors such as protective equipment. This network is known as NANDO, the database of notified bodies recognized by the European Union.

Not all notified bodies are authorized to assess personal protective equipment for motorcyclists, which is why it is important to know which body assesses the conformity, suitability and quality of the system you have chosen to protect your life. The brands with the strongest research and development tradition and the highest quality choose the best laboratories to assess their products against the most reliable standards. These laboratories have systems for verifying the authenticity of the certificates they issue; laboratories other than those authorized through the NANDO network to issue certifications do not offer the same reliability.

If you are buying from a distributor, always visit the manufacturer's website to download the certificates for the product you have chosen.

3. The certification document

A certificate of conformity is mandatory for all personal protective equipment. Under European regulations, every manufacturer of protective equipment is required to display the certifications and conformity approvals of its products visibly on its website.

The manufacturer or the seller of the product you want to buy must provide the product certificates or allow you to download them directly from the website. These certificates include electronic-signature verification mechanisms to validate their authenticity.

This simple three-step procedure — standard + laboratory + document — is the basis for effectively tracing protective equipment and not being cheated with poor-quality products.

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