Safercycle Crash Protection

A safercycle is defined as a street-legal two-wheeled motorcycle with convenient rider crash protection. It will protect the rider when other vehicles hit the front, back or sides of the safercycle or when the safercycle impacts an object

Safety, convenience and cost-effectiveness are the primary design objectives for the safercycle project.

The engineering model safercycle has gone more than 20,000 kilometers but is still being refined. Most of the data gathered so far have been qualitative and subjective due to the limited resources for the project. The shock absorber, cable, pulley wheel and axle are the only components which have been crash tested. The paper discusses advantages and disadvantages of the crash protection design features of the engineering model safercycle. Dynamic crash simulations on a computer followed by fully instrumented crash tests of prototype safercycles carrying anthropometric dummies are needed to develop the safercycle concept.