While the use of protective clothing has been shown to reduce the risk of injury for motorcycle riders, not all protective clothing performs the same in crashes. A European standard for motorcycle protective clothing (EN13595) was released in 2002. Riders that use clothing approved to this Standard should expect good protection. This standard specifies four zones in motorcycle clothing with different levels of protective qualities and four different test methods for assessing abrasion, burst, cut and tear damage resistance. High frequency impact areas are labelled zone 1 and include the elbows, knees, hips and shoulders. Zone 4 has the lowest expected frequency of impact.

This project examined damage location and type in clothing worn by riders following a crash to establish the distribution of impact points and validate the principals indicated in EN13595. Data from 117 crashed motorcycle riders collected during crash investigation were examined. This data included medical data and clothing inspections, and contained 576 cases of clothing damage. To ensure the impact point distribution included all possible contact locations, an additional 433 distinct injury locations were examined where injury had occurred but no damage was observed or no clothing was present at that location. Descriptive techniques were used in the analysis.

The majority of damage occurred in areas covering the extremities or pelvic girdle (93%) with most occurring on the wrists and hands (18%) and the ankles and feet (18%). Clothing regions covering the shoulder (10%), forearm (10%), elbow (9%), thigh (7%), lower leg (6%) and pelvic-hip (5%) were also frequently damaged. Other body regions contributed only 8% of damage seen. Analysis of the injury where no damage occurred demonstrated a similar distribution of impact. The most common types of clothing damage were abrasion, accounting for 69% and torn material which accounted for 26% of all damage. Further, the majority of material abrasion and tearing occurred in regions corresponding to zone 1, followed by zone 2, 3 and then 4. There were very few instances (3%) of burst and cut damage.

The results are in agreement with the general concept of the zoning used in the European standard. However, these results indicate that minor adjustments may be warranted. In particular, the number of impacts to the forearm and lower leg suggest that these regions might be better protected by considering the whole regions as Zone 1or 2 rather than the multiple regions as currently indicated in the Standard. However the subjective nature of determining the zone in which damage (and/or injury) occurred limits these findings and any others that attempt to validate the zone principals using real world data. Further validation requires consideration of the severity of impact at different zones.

This work confirms the validity of the principals of EN13595 but indicates room for modification, and will be of interest to those developing regulatory and consumer assessment protocols for motorcycle protective clothing.