Hacker News Reader

Comment by NickBusey | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why you think a helmet wouldn't do much in a car crash, seeing as in any car race every driver is wearing a helmet.

View on HN

I was talking about the kind of helmets bicyclists wear. The only thing a bicycle helmet would save you from in a car wreck is hitting your head against the windshield/dash which is what we have airbags and seatbelts for.

Also, race cars aren't really comparable to normal driving situations since they go much faster and have a different set of constraints than normal cars. The racing helmets, rollcages, and 5 point harnesses aren't really as necessary at 70mph as they are at 200mph

> In 2013, 50,000 people suffered fatal brain injuries; 19 percent of those were due to car crashes. Among persons aged 5 to 24, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death from fatal TBI (Traumatic brain injury). It’s likely that a good proportion of the 9,500 people might have been saved had they been wearing a helmet in the car.

https://www.treehugger.com/cars/why-all-cars-should-be-hi-vi...

https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html

The data disagree with you.

Your first link has zero information to support that wearing a bicycle helmet would do any good, it only suggests it. Personally I doubt a bicycle helmet would do much good because they aren't designed to protect your head in such an energetic collusion. Your second link only says that motor vehicle wrecks are the cause of 20% of TBI related hospitalization. The word helmet doesn't appear in it at all.

So no, based off of your links I wouldn't say the data disagrees with me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com