Leg Protection for Riders of Motorcycles

A major cause of serious injury in motorcycle accidents is the rider's leg being trapped between the motorcycle and a car. This paper gives results from a number of full-scale impact tests of motorcycles with and without leg-protecting fairings. Motorcycles were crashed into a flat, rigid barrier inclined at 30° to their direction of travel. Three basic configurations were studied: motorcycles with no leg protection, with hard leg protection that absorbed negligible amounts of energy, and with soft leg protectors that absorbed 5 to 10 percent of the kinetic energy on impact. The use of a leg-protecting fairing substantially reduced damage to a dummy rider's legs in crash tests, and a protector that absorbs some energy seems preferable to one that does not. These results were achieved without increasing the risk of other types of injury