Roll cage

[Jim Nilsen]

When the wife rolled the S15 it was amazing she came out alive but the seatbelt kept her in her place luckily. The big problem was that the roofline came in to get her, it came in so far the way it looked if the roll hadn't moved her to the side away from it when it came in she would have hit her head on a lot of steel and glass.

I truly believe that it really depends on the kind of accident you are in the makes the most difference. It's a 50-50 chance as to whether a car without a cage will protect you. If the truck had a cage she still would have never hit it I don't believe but the roofline would have not come in to get her.

The SFI padding is hard for a reason, it has to be to have the correct amount of compression for the impact to slow your head down in relation to your brain. Read all the testing on SFI padding and it is easier to understand why it is so hard. They now make a 2 stage padding that is more user friendly with out a helmet for multi purpose cars. The standard of the years for padding in an accident whether you have a helmet or not will split off the bar and was shown in testing to have absolutely no impact resistance to slowing the motion down at all. It is all about time and distance and from what I have read in the testing I would rather hit SFI padding with no helmet than anything else and with a helmet it is going to do the job it was intended to do.

Having seen the rollover and what it did I would prefer to hit my head on the bar than to have the whole car crush me and still hit my head, if the accident you are in is that bad you are in big trouble no matter what and cages protect you at that extreme. Now small accidents are differnent and I can say that I have been knocked out by the road in a bicycle accident and the road was damn hard as a rollbar and I survived, if I had been hit by a car I would have been lots worse but you don't put cages on bikes.

DRIVE DEFENSIVELY, use your head the right way and it will protect you better than any safety equipment you can buy.

I still keep hearing my instructor at Road America telling me that I never made him feel that the car was ever out of my control and he felt safer with me than most any other student he had ever ridden with. I feel good about that and plan to be just as conservative no matter where I drive !!!