When I was commuting daily in the SF fog, I discovered that putting on of these [1] on my helmet did wonders to keep cars further off my tail. It moves the brake light up to eye level for people in SUVs and also triggers on engine braking.
Wish it were cheaper, but was a worthwhile investment for me.
Also, consider looking into airbag vests if you ride regularly. Also expensive but (supposedly) make a huge difference in crash outcomes.
Motorcycle fatality rates have been trending upwards, not downwards[1]. Brake lights on helmets may illuminate one of the culprits: An ever increasing number of American trucks with poor visibility. Sitting on a bike, you're even shorter than a pedestrian and more likely to be completely out of sight. Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility, as Europe has done.
As an almost-daily motorcyclist with 15k miles on my current machine (Suzuki DL650), I absolutely agree that the increased proportion of pickup trucks on the road increases the risks for riders, however I suspect it is mainly because the larger, heavier vehicles aggravate the effects of a general deterioration in driving skills and attitudes. One thing about riding a motorcycle is that you are, unless you have a death wish, an active and observant participant in what you are doing, which alone separates you from a seeming majority of those driving cars and trucks. You become much more aware of what others on the road are doing, and what they are doing, in large numbers, is acting like twits.
Driving crazily fast in residential areas, rolling through stop signs, blowing off yellow and even red lights, ignoring turn signals, aggressively tailgating cars, trucks, even motorcyclists like myself, tapping away at their phones and steering with their knees. I think I see just about every variation of all of these things at least several times a week, to the extent that I have thought about the idea of creating some kind of org or foundation or even just a blog to advocate a return to taking driving seriously. I don't have a lot of confidence that I could make a difference though. I suspect a lot of the problem is simply many more cars on infrastructure that we haven't put enough money into for decades, but I'm no expert.
It's a really complicated issue, but you might find some of stuff related to Strong Towns, 15 minute cities, and sorta general modern urbanist things interesting. If we had better transit, more connected communities etc, people who are less interested in driving and driving well would have other options than hours long commutes.
The problem is that these people want to drive, and don't care about it. They want to drive for sociological reasons - driving is seen as a symbol of American independence and financial stability. Look at the people who get weird reactions because they chose to walk to work, or schools that object on spurious grounds when they walk their kid to school.
The car is seen as an assumption, a bare minimum. And any attempt to replace it is taking away a personal right.
I think these are really the same thing looked at from opposite side of the circle. When all of your coworkers are driving 45 minutes in on the highway because nothing is local to good housing, public transit isn't available at all, or the public transit available is so bad (in multiple ways) as to beg questions why you'd use it, then it drives the sociological assumptions about other types of transport in the same way the mindset itself drives the conditions which lead to even more assumptions.
One could say it's that people need to want to see better public transit as a good idea for normal people or one could say it's that public transit needs to be made better so people see it that way. In both situations, it's when public transit actually gets improved anything will actually change.
I don't think this is limited to the US, I have exactly the same viewpoint as a Brit and so do many people I know.
People like walking to work and like taking the tube after a night out, but ultimately, the car is just vastly more convenient and comfortable for such a large amount of stuff.
You may as well ask me to give up running water because technically I could just carry it from the well.
Realistically if public transport advocates want progress they need to demonstrate that they also understand the utility of cars because otherwise they come across as simply being wilfully ignorant.
I think there are two different things though, and in the UK the bar is (mostly) just a practical one.
Lots of my colleagues cycle to work, because the cycling infrastructure is great (both from Cambridge City, and from my employer). For those along the Guided Busway corridor, quite a few get to work like that because it is convenient.
Step 1 is to make the public transport good enough so that it is at least as good as taking a car. But the US has Step 2 - convince people that they aren't looking poverty stricken if they take a bus.
I find those authoritarian "people should live their lives how we want them to" sites more annoying than anything. They also tend to be overly dismissive of residential solar, EVs, rural life and homesteading
A friend of mine is a volunteer fireman. Since the fire engine sits higher than just about anything, he can see what people are doing behind the wheel in their SUVs. I’d be shocked, he reports, to know just how many of them are absorbed in their devices while driving.
And since using your device while driving can mean a hefty fine -at least where I live- most of them do it by lowering/turning their gaze from the road so that the device stays more hidden instead of lifting the device and keeping their eyes "mostly" ahead.
I recognise this picture. For example I remember when I used to commute by motorcycle getting cut off by a guy driving a van who had his phone clamped in the crook of his neck and was writing something in a notepad with a pencil and steering with a combination of the notepad and his knees. This is turning at a really busy junction in London[1] during rush hour traffic.
> I don't have a lot of confidence that I could make a difference though.
My recent conclusion is that efforts are worth it even if we're pessimistic about outcome. Often times it is hard to get positive feedback from people you're helping to consider their own behavior even if they don't acknowledge you.
I am not a motorcyclist but I have to agree with your assessment based on my personal experience driving. The risks that morons take while driving is absurd, but I've seen how it affects motorcyclists more. I once saw a motorcyclist nearly get hit because they were being tailgated by a driver and another driver want to pass the tailgater, thinking they were just a slow driver. So the other driver speeds up and attempts to cut off the tailgater, only to realize at the last moment there was a motorcycle there.
After see that, I make sure to give any motorcycle I'm behind an extra buffer of space to make sure I'm not obstructing anyone's view of them.
Yes, driving has become a necessity for everyday life in most places, but we need to pump the brakes and remind everyone it is a privilege, not a right.
i agree with this esp. when the parent linked a wiki page that, if you go beyond the single photo on the page and read it, is completely counter to the comment.
i'm confused too, but ty parent for making me aware of vision zero.
Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to.
My gut feel is that people drove very badly in the before-times but often also very slowly and cautiously at the same time. Speed felt dangerous in old vehicles. Modern computers with wheels are like living rooms with great acceleration and decelaration. Maneuvers which would had taken great skill to perform with an old rear-wheel drive car with bad tires, are now executed routinely like it's nothing, thanks to antispin, traction control etc etc.
Cars are much safer now, especially on the inside, but when you get hit on the outside by a several tonne projectile, it's about the same as it ever were.
this is definitely a big part of it. in the past, cars were either small with tiny engines or big "boats" with massive engines and super soft suspension. those old suspensions weren't really about control - they were for comfort or just trying to deal with all that weight. now basically every car, no matter the size, comes with lighter parts, way smaller but way more powerful engines, smarter computers, better tires, and most importantly, way better suspension. all that means a lot more grip, way faster acceleration and braking, and a much bigger feeling of control - even for people who might not be paying full attention (or really know what they’re doing).
we've kind of made every car a sports car, and that means when people make mistakes, those mistakes get out of hand way quicker before physics wins.
then there’s the whole manufacturer's arms race - the classic prisoner's dilemma. trucks and suvs just keep getting bigger, faster, heavier, packed with screens and gadgets. all the old luxury stuff is standard everywhere now. so everyone is more and more isolated from the actual consequences of bad driving ... until they're not.
>> Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to.
It is from my experience as a rider, as I said in my post, but there are also plenty of studies showing increased deaths and injuries among pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
I think cars becoming safer has ironically driven a lot of this behaviour. People feel safe themselves and don't take care. It's called risk compensation.
I agree modern cars are much better engineered to increase passenger survivablity.
Can’t remember the program (it was a very long time ago) but the crash investigation expert said a 6 inch spike on the driver steering wheel would improve driver’s perception of risk as it would be a very pointed reminder of risk.
I don't think that's what's motivating people. Nobody was dying in droves before. The expected outcome of the mean and median example of distracted driving been purely financial ever since cars grew seatbelts and accidents are more expensive than ever. There's probably some other explanation, though I have no clue what.
> Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility
I argue we should start with the A-pillar. It's not just the big fat American trucks. Every car that is allowed to roll onto the streets is required to have a certain amount of airbag and the push for this seems to have really bad side effects on aspects of safety for everyone not inside the vehicle.
Look at the visibility difference in a 1980s pickup truck and compare it to 2024 model year anything and you would likely feel claustrophobic pretty quickly.
> Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility
I wish my town in NY would ENFORCE laws for tinted windows. It’s epidemic. As a moto rider I rely on being able to see the driver, because if you can’t see their face, they can’t see you.
Of course you can’t see the driver’s face if their car windows are blacked out.
I recently had to frantically wave at a driver about to turn right over a child in the crosswalk. He literally could not see them from his vantage point in his giant SUV.
When I am sitting on my motorcycle I am taller than most people's sitting position in their trucks. While filtering I can look down into their vehicles and see what they're doing on their phones.
Kind of meta, but you deserve recognition for this demonstration of self-awareness. You expressed skepticism politely, then asked specific questions instead of making assumptions. Sometimes HN gives me hope for the rest of the internet.
Sportbikes are lower, but they're not typical. Sportbikes sales trended way down over the past decade, with models being discontinued entirely in some regions. Current sporty-style bikes are generally more upright seating and share engines and platforms with non-sport models. Dual sport/off road bikes have trended upwards, even for riders who never go off pavement, because they're cheap to run and very practical as general purpose motorcycles. More recently, there's been a trend towards large touring bikes as well.
Somewhat yeah, the GS is a tall bike for sure. I have a zrx1200 and I'm still a ton taller than when I am in the miata. Miata is probably one of the lowest riding vehicles you can get and headlights are a problem at night shining in my eyes, where on the motorcycle it is not an issue.
Not really. Outside of a few groups at places like Virginia Tech, motorcycle safety studies don't get much funding. Too niche.
You can use insurance rates as a loose proxy- sportbikes are between one and three orders of magnitude more expensive to insure than adventure bikes, touring bikes or cruisers. But I suspect that has more to do with the average age of the riders.
And bike power. Sportsbikes are often road-legal versions of actual racing bikes, with all that it entails. If a third of cars on the road were tuned-down Ferraris and McLarens, you bet they'd crash left right and center.
Yeah, bike power has increased significantly. Iirc the age distribution of fatal crashes is double peaked, with one peak in the 20s from young riders who don’t know what they’re doing yet, and another in the late 40s or so from older riders who haven’t ridden in 20 years but still think they know what they’re doing. The skills needed to handle a modern 600cc sports bike with 160+ hp are on another level compared to the skills needed for a 600cc sports bike from the 90s with 110hp.
Also slower reaction times (and less testicular fortitude!) in someone older, along with the lack of practice.
There are some situations you can get yourself out of (and many more you can get into!) as a 20 something that will just outright result in death when you’re older.
Source: rode a 1400cc bike for almost a decade, awhile ago. Never went above 140mph on it though.
Kinda. Power delivery is wildly different between an ADV and a sports bike.
On a sorta dual sport like a Kawasaki KLR650 you get peak torque from the engine at around 2500 RPM, which is comfortably in school zone speed limit territory.
Something like the Yamaha R6 won't really start feel like it's pulling until you get the engine above 8000 RPM at least and then you getting peak torque until around 12,000 RPM. By then you're doing 70kph to 90kph in first gear.
Sports bikes are more comfortable ridden aggressively. Unfortunately that also gives a lot of riders a false sense of skill; right until they moment run into a situation above their skill level and they crash while panicking.
A 1300GS has significantly higher horsepower than an R6, variable valves so it pulls across the rev range, and yet still costs a fraction of an R6's insurance cost; it would appear that the riders have a much larger role in the premium than the engine.
Doesn't seem that weird to me. Having lots of horsepower available doesn't mean you have to use it. Conversely, having only modest horsepower is still more than enough to drive at a truly reckless speed on most if not all roads. The psychology of the biker, their inclination to go fast, plays a more important role than the raw horsepower statistic. It seems safe to assume that people who deliberately purchase a race replica, even one with only modest horsepower, are more likely to go way too fast.
In any case, insurance companies have a monetary incentive to go by the data. Whatever the cause, they evidently have data that says race replicas correlate with insurance claims.
Absolutely. I have a meagre Honda ADV 350 with some 28 HP (can't start biking on higher models in Europe, first 2 years its this or lower level), and hell 0-50kmh is blisteringly fast, 50-90kmh still much faster than our BMW with 245HP in sports mode. Sure above 100kmh it gets slower but I use it for non-highway commute, winding roads through vineyards and such so I don't even ride it that way. It makes bike much lighter while its pretty big for a big guy like me, and being nimble is priceless for enjoyment and safety too.
I literally don't need more, it becomes just an ego or emotions game. Faster only gets you to places way sooner than other drivers expect you to, massively increasing risk exposure.
Yeah... I've gotten quotes with that kind of spread between "old man" bikes and very fast sport bikes. IIRC if you buy a cruiser or certain ADVs the insurance company expects to never hear from you with a claim, while certain sport bikes, the insurance expects you to total it within 18 months.
You either don't live in the US/Canada or you don't ride in areas where people drive full-size and "heavy duty" pickup trucks. The Ford F250 for example has a roof that's 7 feet high.
I wish the USA had similar regulations to Australia where modifications require engineering signoff - typically these lifted trucks would fail a rollover test amongst other broken standards (wheelbase wider than the vehicle, for example).
Australia where there's no enforcement of that engineering signoff if it's done after the initial sale.
or where ADR non compliant vehicles are fine because they're imported under the low volume\non manufacturer paths. (there's more than a few tosser owned gmc denali with lifts that bring the bonnet up to 1.7ish metres)
They are not. You step up over the sill to get into an SUV, then your feet go down into the footwell. Your eyes end up slightly lower than a person standing (and much lower in a sedan), while a motorcycle is very close to exactly standing (they have to be able to put their feet down when stopped).
Very much depends on the style of motorcycle. Sitting on my dual-sport BMW F650GS[1] I can see well over sedans on the road and this is with a slightly lowered version of it.
The vast majority of motorcycle crashes are due to excessive speed and inexperience of the rider. Also a car turning into the lane and failing to see the oncoming bike causes many, many accidents.
I ride in Spain, and I don’t know anything about “better visibility” requirements” compared to the U.S. — out here there are giant trucks everywhere: delivery vehicles, industrial trucks, and even Ford Raptors. My close calls have almost always been exclusively with small VW Golf and the SEAT equivalents — distracted, young drivers are (anecdotally) the biggest culprits.
Also in the U.S., you’ll have some 18 year old kid on an R1 that has no business being on an R1, often killing themselves because they think they are Fabio Quateraro at 2am.
I could be wrong, but I’m not seeing data suggesting that “big trucks” in the U.S. are causing more motorcycle deaths. When I drove a Suburban in the U.S., my visibility was far better than when I had a Maserati car. Being able to see over cars allowed me to see more easily when a moto was approaching from the front or rear.
If you want to improve moto safety in the U.S., you need harsher laws against distracted driving, you also need potentially a graduated motorcycle license system like they do in Europe so you don’t have rookies running 1000cc bikes when ten minutes of riding experience.
In Ireland, you can't ride a motorcycle above 125cc unless you've held your license for four years. It forces people to get genuine experience before hopping on a litrebike and sending it.
I think distraction and lack of experience is the main issue regardless of the vehicle.
Also there is a big difference I think with proper motorcyclists who actually get teached how to ride a bike, anticipate drivers behavior and act as if you were invisible at all time, with people riding <125cc motorcycles and moped with a car driving license who just don't take proper safety measures. I see so many 125cc riders overtaking on the right side, splitting lanes at excessive speed without anticipating a driver deciding to switch lanes, etc. Whenever I see a motorcycle rider down in an urban area it is usually on a 125cc or lower scooter.
Exception being the Yamaha T-Max users. They are supposed to have a motorcycle license but they all ride like complete retards with no exception. I think there is something in the nature of that bike, noise combined to instant throttle response and userfriendlyness of the clutchless/gear variator system that attract only the most stupid people of this planet. Yamaha should be ashamed of this.
Fatality rates for all vulnerable road users have skyrocketed in the US. You're three times more likely to die if you're a pedestrian and struck by an SUV than a passenger car. They're also horrifically bad for congestion and pollution.
And trucks and SUVs continue to further dominate the marketplace with some automakers no longer selling sedans at all, making it increasingly difficult to not buy an SUV or "crossover."
Those trucks and SUVs, particularly those made by American and Japanese companies, are focused on "aggressive" looks, which means a giant, angry looking, flat-face nose which is incredibly lethal when hitting a person.
"The front end was always the focal point. The rest of the truck is supporting what the rest of the truck is communicating… we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel, but not in a boyish way, still looking mature. It just had to have that imposing look."
And of course who do these vehicles appeal to? What kind of behavior do they encourage? Every time I'm tailgated it's some dickhead in one of these giant angry-faced trucks.
It's taken the auto "journalists" a while to catch up but they're finally pointing it out:
What's interesting is fatality rates are increasing but injury rates are decreasing.
Seems like something else might be at play. If it is more SUVs and Pickups then I think a brake light helmet would do a lot considering the danger those cars present is being harder to see those below them. But if it is something else, then maybe not as good of a solution.
That seems unfortunately unsurprising. With shorter vehicles (sedans), when you get hit (as a pedestrian, bicyclist, motorcyclist), you are more likely to be pushed over the hood of the car. But with a taller vehicle (truck, SUV), you're more likely to either be propelled forward after hitting the high, flat face of the grille, or get pulled and dragged under the vehicle.
While going over the hood is going to hurt, and can kill you, the other options are much more likely to kill you.
Vehicles with a tall, flat face are more likely to kill instead of injure, from my recall of previous discussions on HN. That's been a trend in vehicle design for a few years now.
The bulbous styling on your average "we would have called this a station wagon 40yr ago but now we call it an compact SUV because stupid laws" vehicle is driven in large part by a need to have big floofy plastic moldings full of airspace for a "soft" place for a pedestrian to land.
On the other hand you've got stuff like the Chvey 2500HD trucks that everyone screeches about that aren't designed that way and will propel a pedestrian back onto the pavement.
There was a news story this week in my area about a car driver who intentionally side-swiped a motorcyclist. The police said what normally kills motorcyclists is that they get thrown and then they hit something solid like a barrier or another car. This guy got lucky that there was an exit nearby and he just slid down the exit lane with minor injuries.
Some “militant” urban cycling commuters do things like attach a pool noodle horizontally and vertically to create space and visibility. I’d probably hazard a guess that avoiding highway miles also lowers your risk profile substantially.
Freeway driving tends to be the safest driving, in any vehicle. This is because speed deltas are typically low, and there are no cross-streets or stopping.
I think the confusion may be that you commented on freeway safety, whereas the comment you replied to discussed highway safety. Freeways are limited access highways; not all highways are freeways.
'Freeway' is a regional term, but the Federal Highway Administration describes them as limited-access with directions of travel separated by a barrier.
Yes and I believe when OP said highway they meant it colloquially, as in a freeway, hence using that term in my reply. A highway wouldn't really make sense since it encompasses just about every road, as you say.
Nobody is cycling on either unless there's dedicated infra anywhere even the slightest bit urban. In rural areas cycling on a limited access road is generally "fine"
Most Americans use freeways, and most do not use motorcycles. It's always hard to compare a rare thing to a common thing, it always has surprising problems. It's like when people on Reddit worry about radon in their basement, but the incidence rate of whatever cancer it was associated with is so low anyway.
What about agency? "Don't worry about kids choking on Legos, kids don't die from choking on Legos" - but that's because parents well informed and really vigilant about it, compared to say batteries. Motor riders avoid freeways.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. There are plenty of statistics available showing that freeway driving is the safest driving vehicles do. There's not as much available for motorcycles specifically, which is why I dug up a relevant link and shared it. It seems to hold true for MCs too (and I have no reason to suspect it wouldn't.)
The fact that people describe someone on a bicycle placing less than a pound of foam sticking out from their bicycle, usually shorter than the legally mandated passing distance, as "militant" when trucks and SUVs are purposefully designed by car companies to look as aggressive and angry as possible, really tells why US vulnerable road user safety is plunging while European vulnerable road user safety is going up.
I helped Alex invent that product! I built the first prototype that helped him get funding and hand assembled some of the first PCB designs. My (old) name is on the patent.
I’m glad to see this was already posted. I wear mine when I ride my 1500w ebike around and I feel so much safer with it. It’s really bright too!
I did not write the production code but I imagine they are tracking the velocity and acceleration vectors using a kalman filter and lighting up the lights when acceleration is negative in the direction of travel. By tracking the velocity vector in addition to acceleration one can eliminate the effects or the driver turning their head. I.e you are not just looking for a specific accelerometer axis to go negative, you have to use a more complex filter to determine the actual physical direction of travel of the device even as it rotates, and check for negative acceleration in that direction. To learn more:
Yussss I’ve been really impressed that Alex has made such a solid product. He was starting up just as my business failed and I warned him it can be a difficult road, but he stuck with it and has delivered something really special.
I have a smiley face rendered in retroreflective tape on the back of mine. I figure it's both bright and triggers the very sensitive human visual system for detecting faces. It's hard to say how much it helps, especially since I put it on basically the same time I started riding at all, but I don't often have people tailgating me. ed: and it was only a couple bucks, that's nice.
When I was into road cycling I find having a banana sticking out my rear jersey pocket would make drivers treat me better. I later saw a study that drivers think cyclists are less human, so my theory is it reminded them that I am, in fact, just a person using the road.
Alas, even the banana stopped working, though. Road cycling is horrible now. Too many cars.
Nice idea! Cars owner sometime use a "children inside" sticker. Won’t work for a solo bike obviously but wonder if some other messages might be effective like "Dad of toddlers", "I might be a cop", "vulnerable human"… the smiley is easier to read through.
I have a negative visceral reaction to the "baby on board" stickers on cars. It feels really entitled; to me it says, "be extra careful with me, because my small child is more deserving of safety than other people".
Think more like "I can be really distracted and suddenly swerve because my toddler threw their drink at me".
Like with L-plate drivers. Be very careful, don't hate, they're just danger to themselves and everyone else around. They're not entitled, they're warning.
Yeah I get the logic but its still flawed and wrong (saying this as a father of 2 small kids who drives them around frequently).
You either are road-worthy driver who can drive safely or not. L ones are an approved exception and the list and law and expectations ends right there.
Nobody is babysitting 27 categories or potentially distracted or otherwise dysfunctional drivers. If you can't drive safely either have somebody else drive, use public transport or stay home. No excuses, you can very easily kill people including your own kids.
If you'd like to be less unnecessarily cynical, you can instead read it as "there's someone in the vehicle who is more fragile, and less likely to survive an accident."
I’d like to see it like that too but we don’t observe much « oldie inside » stickers. I don’t think he’s cynical and understand the sticker as a polite way to say the driver have more care for his baby than others human being, which is not to blame of course.
Ha, I have heard a couple motorcyclists sincerely recommend open-carrying a gun to scare off murderous asshole drivers (which, to be clear, absolutely exist). Neither of those options are on my to-do list though. :)
Anyone who open carries anywhere other than the wilderness or in the field while hunting is at best an attention whore with main-character syndrome . . . at best.
What's more, notwithstanding the freakouts from Europeans and blue-staters about so-called "gun culture," you have no right to employ a firearm anywhere in the US unless someone is actively threatening to kill or maim you or a person near you. Not because you got in a road-rage pissing contest.
If anything, bringing a gun into a situation like that is a great way to get a felony assault/brandishing charge and lose your ability to own a gun period.
Agree, but does the comparaison of "threatening to kill" and "flat out murder [while driving, right?]" stands? I’m not sure you’re allowed to use you gun to clear out your way because the priority violation was intentional.
If I was putting a sign on my bike, it would be "Put down your phone [you asshat]". Personal insults optional, but definitely deserved. Maybe a graphic of a mangled and cracked phone would do it.
> moves the brake light up to eye level for people in SUVs
Sad that this would be needed. At that price it's insane to me. OP's article is about democratizing safety and keeping it at a low price, while this over engineered brake light is $160 plus tax. Then a 3350 mAh battery and it lasts only 8-12 hours. Crazy
I wonder if that's the one the author refers to when they say, "I purchased one of the few similar products on the market. To my surprise, it relied solely on a basic tilt switch, rattling excessively during rides despite claims of “advanced technology."
I have one of the Brake Free lights and it uses an accelerometer, it's NOT just a basic tilt switch. Nor does it rattle when riding, it's a very solid unit.
I've had friends following me (both in cars and motorcycles) who comment later they can't believe how much more visible it makes me.
It does attach to a helmet and require that you periodically recharge the battery but I'm very happy with the purchase (as opposed to just flashing the brake lights on the bike when slowing)
Californian motorcycle commuters are on another level in terms of risk imo. People are lane splitting at like 30mph over the speed of the rest of the traffic and absolutely no one checks for bikers before merging. It is a miracle more people don’t die on the 5 or the 101 every day.
No kidding. The only time I've ever seen motorcycle accidents is on the 10 and 101. Highways in California in general are ridiculous; I'm constantly amazed driving on the 110 that more people don't get killed at the on-ramps with blind curves and everyone going 20 mph over the speed limit.
Oh, now I see that it's just based on an accelerometer. Marketing it as "wireless" seems to suggest that it is monitoring the brake lights rather than "automatically" flashing based on motion.
Tbf, even cars put the brake lights on based purely on deceleration nowadays in addition to triggering when the brake pedal is pressed. It's covered by legislation in both EU and US, since BEVS and PHEVs can have very aggressive regen braking, and the legislation basically says if your rate of deceleration is above X, then lights need to be on even if the brake pedal hasn't been pressed.
In addition, some cars - I don't know if this is legislated or a feature - will blink the brake lights or even the alarm lights if it detects a sudden hard brake (emergency brake). But people would do that themselves anyway if they for example had to slow down suddenly due to a traffic jam or whatever.
If you read the article then you will see that the accelerometer is a feature that makes it safer. Apparently, motorcycles can brake even if you don't use the brake, and then you really want the lights to turn on.
> Apparently, motorcycles can
> brake even if you don't use
> the brake
They've even made cars with that "motorcycle" feature, it's most commonly activated by moving a sort of "stick" situated between the driver and passenger seat.
'avar' is talking about "engine braking" with a manual transmission car. Most motorbikes have a manual transmission.
If you gear down (you are cruising in fourth gear and 'gear down' to third gear), your vehicle's speed will reduce.
Brake lights are triggered by the brake pedal or lever/pedal on a motorcycle.
In the case of engine braking, the brake lights are not triggered. Drivers behind them can't anticipate stopping without such a signal.
Try it yourself! Some automatic cars, you can gear down, or just pull your parking brake a little. Cars behind you will come dangerously close to hitting you. Also, don't try this.
Wait, do new cars' parking brakes trigger the brake lights? I also wonder about regenerative braking in electric cars where they slow down simply by lifting your foot off the accelerator.
Lifting your foot off the accelerator in a Nissan Leaf triggers brake lights when in e-Pedal mode (one foot driving, no need to use the brake pedal except in an emergency). It reminds me of a feature that car manufacturers declined to install (due to cost) many years ago, in which brake lights would be triggered by rapidly taking your foot off the accelerator. The idea was that this scenario would usually be followed by emergency braking and that anyone following would see the brake lights come on a fraction of a second earlier.
> it's most commonly activated by moving a sort of "stick" situated between the driver and passenger seat
It's not even specific to the ones with the stick. I happen to enjoy and prefer vehicles with three pedals, but I can say from personal experience that a Ford AODE, 4R70W, or 4R100 will hit hard enough to scare passengers when you drop a gear at highway speed.
A Chrysler 45RFE on the other hand will make a lot more noise but basically no braking effort when you downshift.
> Basically to every European country (-including Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), but in fact we accept and ship orders worldwide. However some markets might not be setup for automated checkout. If you are experiencing difficulty for shipping to a certain country, contact us so that we can manually create a draft order for you to review and complete.
...they kindof "always" had reliability issues w/ detecting braking accurately, I think switching between the handlebar remote/sensor or phone sensors. It's an existing product with a direct analogue to your project goal, and minimally you could trawl for contacts within customer reviews or online reports to get some ideas about the good/bad in this problem space.
Beware of patents (as relevant), but it's a noble and useful project and goal.
I ride a bicycle, and I deliberately mount the rear light directly at the eye level of typical sedans and SUVs. It's not connected to the brakes, but I find that having the light pulse is enough.
I've got the rear flasher on my road bike tucked as high under the seat as it can get, but even with a large frame bike and relaxed commuting (non-aero) posture I'm shorter than the hood lots of full-size SUVs and pickups, much less the seat.
I agree with the other commenter that a 360 cam on top of the helmet has been the most important thing for deterring tailgating and road rage. I've added reflective tape on the frame, the blinking blinking lights under the seat, a headlight on the handlebars and a headlamp with front white and rear red light, and my backpack has a nearly fluorescent neon green cover. Those all help reduce the "Oops, didn't see you there while looking at my phone" close calls, but do nothing to reduce intentional harassment - that's the function of the camera.
Sorry if I was unclear. I have two rear lights. The first one is mounted on the seat post near the eye level of sedans. The second one is mounted at the bottom of the helmet near the eye level of large SUVs.
If you have a hub generator system, they sell rear lights with controllers which detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation and start pulsing when you decelerate.
That would be more difficult, expensive, and unreliable. The light is powered by the rotation of the wheel so it already has a reliable braking signal.
How is that difficult, expensive, or unreliable? What could be simpler than a switch that closes when a lever is closed, and turns on a light?
That sounds much simpler, cheaper, and reliable than "detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation".
Also, it works like a car's brake lights, which drivers are accustomed to, rather than "start pulsing when you decelerate", which is when you stop pedaling (unless going downhill).
The light is already by necessity hooked up to the wheel for power and adding a switch and wires to the brakes adds another point of failure making the system less reliable, makes installation more difficult because you have to wire up to the hub generator and the brakes, and more expensive because more components.
Yeah, I have the Busch & Müller Toplight [1]. "The Toplight Line Brake Plus senses when the bike slows under braking and glows brighter. It does this by monitoring the AC frequency from the hub. During braking, the AC frequency slows quickly, and then makes the LEDs pulse or flicker, hopefully getting the attention of that fool in the jacked up SUV behind you."
It's very important to consider failure modes when adding something like this.
You should ensure there's no way the new addition could prevent the brake light from working if the electronics were to fail (either electrically, software glitch, corrosion, bad connection, etc). Because failing to light the brake lights upon braking could directly cause an accident.
Secondary perhaps (though still important) is to prevent false positives (brake light illuminating when just driving along normally). That's still bad, but at least other drivers would be suspicious of it and it's more obvious.
I am considering adding a watchdog logic in the microcontroller that holds a mosfet gate, if there is any signs of failure in logic it would pass through the normal light signal.
A lot is also dependent on how it's wired into the vehicle, as in the main electrical failure modes like open circuit, short to ground, stuck at +12V, etc. Need to be careful about where the responsibility (and liability) is.
I have a second concern re: posi-tap as a connection method. Personally, I would not use a insulation displacement connector like that in a high-vibration environment, at least not without many many hours of accelerated lifetime testing under high vibration load. It's possible they're fine, but at the end of the day you're driving a couple of knives partway through a wire in a way that's non-inspectable.
For field installs perhaps the low-temp soldering butt splices would work well? That would be my go-to in your shoes. It does require cutting and stripping wires, which has its own issues if done by the layperson, but it does connect and encapsulate the joint in a way that should be very robust to vibration and to environmental contamination/corrosion.
Genie soldering is not preferred for high vibration environments. Crimping is considered more reliable. Proper strain relief and anti corrosion treatment is key.
It's not preferred for inline connections, but context is important. In a field installation, you can do up a solder-type butt splice with a lighter if you really need to, whereas crimping requires specialized tools.
True enough, but I would take it one farther and say that a properly executed hand splice is arguably preferable to solder if vibration is a factor. Also, even less tools needed, though not everyone carries a little tube of conductive grease with their electrical tape. (But they should, it makes a decent splice immune to corrosion and a solid, “permanent” repair. )
I have had many, many soldered splices fail on generators, marine engines, other long running equipment.
They just break where the copper meets the solder joint. Copper generally has poor fatigue characteristics, depending on the alloy.
Some of this also comes down to harness design and how it's put back together after the splice. Ideally, the exposure of the splice itself to flexing is very low. I reckon if it's strain relieved/mechanically fastened well and encapsulated, it doesn't really matter what style of splice you use.
Yes, strain relief is key. Even more so for soldered connections where vibration is significant. But really, no joint is immune to problems without some kind of strain relief to prevent stress concentrations at the rigidity transitions.
I agree that soldering probably won’t produce any issues if the wire is not subjected to significant flexure or vibration, or if it properly strain relieved and secured to a bulkhead so there is no movement at the limit of solder wicking. It’s just that I’m usually too lazy to do that perfectly, so I tend towards more forgiving solutions in vehicles and equipment. But sometimes, solder is the one true way, and I always feel better about soldered joints even if I know I’m statistically wrong.
As for wire being 100 percent copper? I’m not sure, but I have definitely noticed different rigidity of copper fibers. Might be impurities, annealing, or work hardening from the drawing process… but there is definitely variation. Some wire can be really susceptible to fatigue cracking, while others seem relatively immune. Not sure of the why.
Also, don’t even get me started on copper plated aluminum fiber wires.
I think the ideal here would be what good trailer brake adapters do in cars that are not factory equipped with a trailer light connector: they have an adapter for each car model that plugs directly in to the stock wiring harness at the taillight. No soldering, no stripping wires, no piercing insulation. However, this complicates the product because you need an adapter for each bike manufacturer and possibly each bike model or even model year.
Another advantage of this is it simplifies installation for the bike owner. Just mount the controller and connect the plugs.
You have to run the business case (at the end of the day all the work you do has to support this).
What's the NRE/tooling and marginal cost to produce a harness variant, and how many units with that variant will you sell? Will people buy the device without the harness adapter?
OE connectors are hard to get, they're typically not some stock Molex or Deutsch dealy-o. I've worked on projects where we 3D printed whole connector blocks to try to do get mating to OE ECUs. It kinda sucks, and you need a whole lot of volume to support that kind of engineering.
Agree, it has to be practical. The better trailer light adapters do it but probably not for every obscure older car/truck model. And really the whole product idea is something that only applies to older low-end bikes. Newer/higher end bikes increasingly have this feature from the factory.
The author did a great job actually building the project, doing a layout and custom design rather than just stitching together off the shelf modules. Good work.
That being said, in 20 years of riding motorcycles and being an ATGATT (all the gear, all the time) kind of rider, I'm mixed on the need for this. It's something I have thought about doing with a direct hardwire to the throttle, but I can't come up with a situation where I genuinely think it will stop a crash. Maybe if someone is tailgating you, but you should be readily letting them pass rather than relying on their reaction skills anyway. Anything that is sudden and requires a large -dv/dt, you are going to hit your brakes. Engine braking alone is usually used in situations where the road/conditions dictates it, so other drivers are naturally slowing down too.
But I suppose it is also an "it can only help" type product.
EV's with regen braking and manual transmission vehicles are in the same boat: unless they light up when slowing, following drivers will be surprised. The bare standard IMO for all vehicles should not be to light up when brakes are applied but instead any time the vehicle begins decelerating. Adding flashing for a strong stop ~~ >0.75g would be a bonus. Given all the sensors and compute hardware on vehicles -- even bikes -- these days it should just be a software touch.
The Technology Connections YT guy has a whole piece analyzing tail lights and I agree with him.
For what it's worth, I've driven a manual for the past 25 years in the US and I haven't noticed any significant increase in tailgated even when I decelerate. I'm definitely the kind of stick driver who avoids braking and pushes in the clutch and lets the vehicle cruise to a lower speed when possible.
Granted, it's also a red (small) pick-up truck, so pretty visible.
Many automatic transmission cars already turn on their brake lights when losing speed regardless of whether the brakes are pressed or whether not enough throttle is being applied to maintain speed.
I also believe some more recent cars turn on their hazards when brake speeds exceed a certain threshold (I still do that manually).
Regarding EVs: That's already implemented that way. Once EVs start braking more than "expected from roll resistance" the braking lights come on.
I think there were also bugs on some Hyundais where they wouldn't stop or start or whatever, but I think that was sorted. With my Skoda I can see the braking lights go on when I change a higher regeneration step.
> Adding flashing for a strong stop ~~ >0.75g would be a bonus.
Is that a good idea? A flashing brake light could appear as if the brake was let go, which is the exact opposite of the message you would want to send in that case.
Or maybe we are talking about flashing between two different illuminated states?
It’s a common (mandatory?) feature in Europe. Brake lights flash under very hard / emergency brake conditions. The flashing is very rapid, definitely gets your attention, and couldn’t be confused for “letting go” of the brake.
For cars at last I thought it were the warning lights that were going off. Mostly because this is a common way to inform others that there are problems ahead (and a bed to quickly brake)
I guess those situations where you are engine braking and a non-tailgating driver doesn't realize he's closing to an unsafe distance. Then one of a couple of things could cause a collision from this preventably-dangerous situation.
If you drive a manual in a hilly area, or a city with poorly-coordinated traffic lights, it can be an extremely frequent event.
Not that trying to shed tailgaters or trigger-happy brake lights are foolproof. A couple decades ago, my car was totaled by a rear-end collision. I was stopped and stuck in the traffic at a red light. The at-fault driver popped over a little hill with her nose stuck in a map - failing to notice me, the other vehicles, or the red light, in time.
I drove a manual with a 4.6l v8 as my daily driver for 8-10 years.
After taking a motorcycle safety course (in which they teach applying the brake to trigger the lights when engine braking to alert cars behind you )
I did some anecdotal testing / started triggering the brake lights when engine braking in the car. While not effective for everyone behind me, triggering the brake lights did seem to increase the distance people began to slow at, and also their following distance increased.
I was once rear ended, while I was completely stopped, with a train going by in front of me. Since it was a flat level surface I had let me foot off the brake.
I do wonder if I had still had the brake applied if the person would have noticed. (However, this is a poor example as the driver who rear ended me was an unlicensed 16 year old driving illegally ).
While on my motorcycle, I try to always trigger my brake lights. I will trigger them rapidly in scenarios where I have sufficient stopping distance but I would be doing a more aggressive stop in a car as the flashing does seem to get more attention.
Having driven (and engine braked) both diesel and gas manuals - yes, a diesel is much better at slowing "very hard". Beware of doing that if someone is close or inattentive behind you.
With either one, any need-to-brake situation gets more complex - you need to decide "brake pedal, engine, or both?". But I'm not driving manuals because I want driving to be super-simple.
Interesting. I found my diesel Mercedes to not have much engine braking at all (which I attributed to the lack of a throttle plate or any throttling of airflow) as compared to similar size and weight gas cars (which have a throttle plate in the intake).
Supposedly, the engine controls in my VW diesel (90HP 4-cylinder "TDI" engine) cut off all fuel when the driver was engine breaking (no throttle, RPM's above current desired idle speed). Perhaps they made other adjustments. It could brake pretty hard that way.
I'd guess the engine controls in your Mercedes handled that situation rather differently, for "Mercedes customers will expect..." reasons.
I like a brake you can choose to tap without engaging proper brakes just to flash your lights backwards, instead of worrying about more smarts in the vehicle that can stop working or whatever.
In best cases this brake gives a bit of feedback when it engages the light but not yet engage the actual brake.
You are free to use this technique to signal "back off" whenever you're engine braking or before you brake or even when you're not even braking but don't like the tailgater
I’ve found this to be true of most cars- where you can very lightly touch the brake where the light will turn on before the actual brakes engage / engage in a noticeable way. It’s a great tool.
Especially important when engine braking down large hills, as I notice people don’t always seem to realize how rapidly they are approaching you if they don’t receive a braking signal.
I agree with you - situational awareness is what keeps us safe, and not engaging with poor drivers but rather creating distance.
for braking, I use engine braking at stop lights, and can easily slow down almost all of the way without any brakes applied. Motorcyclists should definitely be taught to drag the rear brake when engine braking to let others know. Most people are unaware of how quickly a bike can slow down, or rather, how so little mass reacts much differently to situations (ex. even going downhill, unless in 5th/6th gear, bikes generally don't pick up speed coasting but rather slow down).
You're making an assumption that someone tailgating you wants to pass. That isn't really true. A decent percentage of drivers just want to tailgate someone.
> BMW’s dynamic brake light, for example, flashes during emergency braking to alert trailing drivers, greatly enhancing road safety.
Mind you, that this is not enabled in all countries. In the USA the rear fog lights turn on in addition to the brake lights under heavy braking, as flashing the lights weren't allowed.
They remain on until you no longer depress the brakes.
Unsure if they're allowed right now, or whether the ones you see are aftermarket mods.
For BMW you can change the coding (configuration) relatively easy.
There is also a difference in 3 flashes when you touch the brakes, constant flashing while pressing the brakes, or only flashing under having braking.
I can't imagine driving in stop&go traffic where all brake lights are constantly flashing.
I dont understand why exactly this isnt mandatory for past 2 decades in regulated markets like EU.
Over easter I had the displeasure of driving cca 1500km road with family and we experienced quite a few 130kmh -> full stop without warning situations that one barely manages even when breaking full and heavily relies on all others doing the same. In one of the situations a car right in front of us didnt manage and hit already-crashed cars in front of it in billiard style, plastics and glass flying everywhere, luckily nobody was injured but cars were in pieces.
Second case next day - again full stop out of blue, ahead, we & after us managed within 3-4m of each other, but cars after that didnt, again billiard that travelled all the way up to us (we ended up with few scratches on back spoiler, I moved our car a bit ahead when I heard big bangs behind, avoiding bigger damage to us).
One only has a split second to realize how quickly that car ahead is closing in in such scenarios if you dont have other info. Could save hundreds of lives each year easily and easy to implement.
> my US mazda cx5 center brake light flashes when you press the brakes.
That is not a factory feature, it's almost certainly a dealer-installed piece of junk like this (https://pulseprotects.com/product-info/) which the dealer almost certainly charged a stupid amount of money for, and as noted it's not actually legal in the US.
Around me the local Hyundai/Kia chain loves to install those, and I hate them.
As you may be aware, the US is a confederation of states. The type of light that flashes several times at the initiation of braking is specifically authorized by the California Vehicle Code, and perhaps in other states.
Do you have a reference as to where it's allowed in the CVC? FMVSS section 108 table I-c specifies this for the stop light:
Steady burning.
Must be activated upon application of the service brakes.
When optically combined with a turn signal lamp, the circuit must be such that the stop signal cannot be activated if the turn signal lamp is flashing. May also be activated by a device designed to retard the motion of the vehicle.
(a) Any motor vehicle may also be equipped with a system in which an amber light is center mounted on the rear of a vehicle to communicate a component of deceleration of the vehicle, and which light pulses in a controlled fashion at a rate which varies exponentially with a component of deceleration.
(b) Any motor vehicle may be equipped with two amber lamps on the rear of the vehicle which operate simultaneously with not more than four flashes within four seconds after the accelerator pedal is in the deceleration position and which are not lighted at any other time. The lamps shall be mounted at the same height, with one lamp located on each side of the vertical centerline of the vehicle, not higher than the bottom of the rear window, or if the vehicle has no rear window, not higher than 60 inches. The light output from each of the lamps shall not exceed 200 candlepower at any angle horizontal or above. The amber lamps may be used either separately or in combination with another lamp.
(c) Any stoplamp or supplemental stoplamp required or permitted by Section 24603 may be equipped so as to flash not more than four times within the first four seconds after actuation by application of the brakes.
> According to a document by SafeLite of America, Inc., that you enclosed, its product Safe-T-Stop "will pulse [the center high mounted brake light] for approximately 6 seconds and reactivate if the brakes are reapplied." You read S5.5.10(d) of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 108 as requiring "that the third brake light must be wired to be steady-burning," and that you believe that Safe-T-Stop "contravenes this requirement of the standard by varying the brightness of the light."
> We confirm your interpretation. S5.5.10(a), (b), and (c) list the motor vehicle lamps that may flash when they are operated. No stop lamp is among the lamps listed. S5.5.10(d) requires all other lamps to be wired to be steady burning, thus including all stop lamps. Standard No. 108 does not allow a stop lamp that pulses, and a vehicle with a stop lamp that pulses does not meet Federal requirements.
It's clear that there's not much enforcement, since all the dealers I've visited near me install these things by default. If you commit to a car that's not yet delivered, you can negotiate to exclude these, or you can have them remove it (but they'll most likely have cut into the factory harness to install it, so the wiring harness has been modified, which is a negative IMHO).
Personally, I find these devices to be pretty terrible. I would be fine with flashing for high intensity braking, but the flashing is attention grabbing by design, and it's inappropriate in a lot of situations as it distracts from gathering awareness of the surroundings.
No one cares, not all states have mandatory inspections, and many inspectors just check if the brake light comes on when they press the brake pedal which would not reveal such an aftermarket device.
The only way to catch something like this would be a road driving test by the inspector, and even here in Europe this is not required.
IIRC in the USA there are features allowed to be installed aftermarket that aren't legal to be installed as a dealer option (like front side-window tinting)
I wondered once if it would be possible to ride a motorcycle safely if I drove carefully (everyone I know who rides has been in at least one serious accident).
I thought: I could look at the data, but I see so many motorcyclists driving dangerously that the data wouldn't teach me much.
So then I thought: I bet if I look at the accident rate for women riders it would be interesting.
I found that in the UK, male riders have seven times the accident rate of female riders.
So I guess how you ride does make a huge difference.
Age is another differentiator. Take young men out of the equation and you get a much better picture.
Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are
single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.
So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.
Some guy out for a cruise laying his bike down after things got a little more spicy than her was prepared for mid corner is a fundamentally different kind of accident than someone T-boning a left turning car and going over the handlebars in commuting traffic.
Texting and driving probably accounts for a lot of minor bumps in stop and go traffic that cause inconsequential damage and obviously no injury and isn't really relevant to someone who texts and drives into stopped traffic at highway speeds.
Treating those sorts of accidents that are categorically different in both cause and effect one homogenous statistical blob really rubs me the wrong way.
This sadly does not say anything because the kilometers driven is unknown in this statistic, right?
So it could be that female drivers do not drive that many kilometers compared to males, which results in less accidents.
Also, is this accidents total men / women? Then it would not even take into account, that there are significant more male riders.
GP didn't specify, but IIRC vehicle incident rates are usually specified in terms of distance driven/ridden, so the stats they were looking at may have already taken that into account.
This would be better. Still does not take into account bigger and smaller bikes. I find it extremely difficult to judge that. From my experience, you are absolutely right. Men seem to take higher risk and some of them the consequences.
There are so many ways to die on a motorcycle that are outside of your control. Someone could not be paying attention, make a mistake, not see you, be drunk, etc.
I knew someone at a previous company that was here one day then gone the next due to a non-highway accident caused by someone else IIRC.
It's sort of like being friends with someone who plays low-chance russian roulette for fun in their free time.
This might sound overly fatalistic but... everyone is playing low-chance Russian roulette all the time. I know multiple people who've died of random health issues far sooner than they should have, tomorrow isn't promised for anybody. May as well do one of the most fun activities ever invented by humans in the meantime
It simply comes down to riding like everyone's out to get you. Another comment summed it up nicely by saying you essentially have to position yourself assuming no one has explicitly seen you.
I've done a decent amount of miles like that and I've barely had any close calls.
Brake lights should be activated whenever the vehicle is significantly slowing down regardless of whether the brakes are being used or not. And this should be standard across _all_ vehicles, not just motorcycles. I would say brakes should also override any automated method too, just in case of malfunction.
This is just (I am not trying to trivialise the incredible amount of effort required to take a hardware project, even a simple one, to market) an LIS3DH wired to some brake lights. Every single road-vehicle could easily have this technology.
I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).
There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.
I don’t understand the voices against it: even if it’s recuperating, the car _is_ decelerating, which is why it triggers (and it should). What’s the problem according to them?
The threshold can be a problem- you don't want the threshold to be too low, or else the brake lights come on when even slight deceleration is occurring. This would give an annoyingly too-common signal that would possibly be disregarded/ not be an effective form of visual communication.
As I understood it, it's less of a real problem and more of a perceived annoyance. People accelerate, let go of the pedal, realize that a deceleration sets in, accelerate again, etc. so their brake lights are flashing all the time (instead of just using their cruise control to have this happen much more smoothly and ideally below the relevant thresholds).
I live in a mountainous area that attracts huge amount of motorcyclists on weekends. Most of the fatal accidents I recall in the last years (usually around a dozen per year) were caused by right of way violations by cars, by excessive speeding of the cyclists, or by risky overtakes. I am not sure how a brake light would help there.
Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
Isn't the issue that some people work around MOT decibel limits? After all they only need to pass the decibel limit on the MOT test, and not on the road in regular use.
The engineering solution approach doesn't seem to be fundamentally different to speed cameras.
I used to live in downtown Chicago, where the worst violators where high end sports cars, though we did get the occasional quartet of motorcycles ripping down the roat at 3am.
Illinois doesn't require vehicle inspections, so there's no opportunity for exhaust modifications to be discovered.
Motorcycle exhausts are easy to swap out so people could easily take the MOT with the stock exhaust then swap the loud exhaust into place when they get home.
Id like to see this kind of brake light as the default for any vehicle, not just motorbikes.
As for the noise, I get it. And I think the industry and the riders are to blame, motorbikes have been getting outrageously loud. Especially the fact that some newer bikes even come with exhaust valves that open at like 55-60 km/h is insane to me.
While I enjoy the hobby I cometely understand why Südtirol did what it did and I won't be surprised to see strict limits like these pop up elsewhere too.
When I was a child, our suburban home was at the mouth of a dead-end but very straight street. It was 100% residential, 25mph, single lane each way, but many motorists abused it. We could often tell when someone was lost, looking for the freeway, looking for a through lane that would put them somewhere else.
When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)
Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.
And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.
My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
Could say the same for cars, which contribute to more noise pollution.
Yep. It’s weird to call out motorcycles when typically any good mountain roads frequented by motorcyclists are more commonly used by cars. Especially at night when any noise would be most disturbing. Motorcyclists don’t typically ride very fast on dark mountain roads at night (headlights on motorcycles barely illuminate anything) but auto enthusiasts certainly will.
I’ve had both “loud” bikes and cars (all legal - stock, in fact). The cars easily have 10x the mileage.
The one thing I’d say is - you can’t really control sound of the external world. Cities are infinitely louder. I live in nyc right now and live off a major avenue near the Lincoln tunnel. Whatever annoyances people here have with loud bikes, trust me - my noise is 1000x worse on a daily level. Yet, I’m not perturbed by it unless I open the window cause I chose a place that used quality windows and insulation.
They simply don't care for the second part. Some even consider it a safety feature (to be known well in advance) and modify exhausts to be louder accordingly.
The amount of time me or our kids were woken up by some ferrari, maserati, chopper et al flooring it on purpose on nearby intersection past midnight has been many, punishment 0 nothing. After moving to rural countryside its one of many aspects I am certainly not missing from previous life and would have hard time coming back to lower quality of life in cities.
“If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.”
― Neal Stephenson, Zodiac
I have ridden motorcycles for 20 years and could not agree more. Defensive riding, assume distraction and reckless drivers, perhaps even willingness to bump into you “accidentally on purpose”. I have actually experienced the latter.
You'd only see it on newer bikes with ABS, they seem likely to have more sensors and "electronics" in the brake system. In that kind of system the deceleration could be inferred from existing speed signals. I wouldn't be surprised if ABS systems already estimate the engine braking torque directly.
What is the general consensus on ABS braking in motorcycles? Really curious to hear from anyone who has rode a bike equipped with it.
For some reason the idea of a bike interfering with brake controls seems like it could feel unsafe if the system isn't designed really well. Extremely low margin for error when it comes to braking on a 2 wheel vehicle especially in suboptimal conditions.
I could see ABS braking being fine for the back tire, but the idea of automatic braking on the front tire would scare me.
Front brake is where it's most beneficial as the front wheel is what keeps the bike upright. If you lock the front wheel, especially in a turn, the bike falls over almost instantly.
edit: Rear wheel locking gives a bit more time to react.
Personally the main safety benefit is for emergency braking in wet conditions. ABS also allows to use full brakes in the wet without worrying so much about falling over. That's the real benefit, real-world it shortens your stopping distance because of that increased confidence in using the brake.
> ABS also allows to use full brakes in the wet without worrying so much about falling over. That's the real benefit, real-world it shortens your stopping distance because of that increased confidence in using the brake.
I think this point is worth emphasizing. You'll hear from a lot of folks on motorcycle forums that ABS will increase stopping distance. Which is true for great drivers performing threshold braking. How many motorcycle riders actually practice front braking on their non ABS bike until they lock up the front wheel to really learn the limits of themselves and their bike? For most people, you'll be able to use more brakes and stop in a shorter distance in more conditions with ABS while maintaining control of the vehicle.
I'd consider myself a pretty good rider but I've caught myself once or twice jamming on the brakes when a chaotic accident unfolds in front of me and the lizard brain takes over. I live in LA so lots of traffic and lots of accidents are common and any technology that helps my lizard brain keep me alive in a positive in my book.
I recently crashed cornering during a light mist and now I'm on the looking for anything that helps lean slippage. I know you can't fix stupid but still hoping something is out there. My old and busted vstrom needs an upgrade.
Yes, as I understand it ABS catches the occasion where your braking overwhelms the wheel-road friction the wheel locks and starts to skid. If you're before that threshold then it doesn't activate and doesn't negatively affect anything, if you do lock then ABS activating is better than not having it and the remedy is the same as without ABS where you release the brake enough for the wheel to turn again. A skid is the least desirable in terms of control and stopping distance, having ABS lets a driver hit the brakes hard in an emergency with more confidence.
There's a great FortNine video showing the pros and cons. The very short of it is that the perfect rider can stop faster without ABS but ABS + good technique can achieve very similar results while drastically reducing the consequences of panic braking.
This isn't mentioned in the video, but ABS also enables more aggressive use of linked brake systems, which also improve worst-case safety when a rider panics and uses only one brake or the wrong brake.
There's no such thing as "consensus" in any hobby, but the general trends are:
1. ABS on motorbikes has been proven to prevent lock-ups and therefore accidents, especially among newer riders who are more likely to grab all the brakes in situations where modulation of brake application is required to prevent an accident.
2. Traditionalists say that ABS keeps new riders from having to learn to correctly modulate the brakes and thus keeps them reliant on ABS forever, and that experienced riders can stop quicker without ABS. (The last point is technically true but it requires a highly-skilled rider and a certain set of conditions.)
ABS is bikes IS typically designed very well. (Although I have to take the Internet's word for it since my bike is a 1979 GS850G.)
Most, if not all, modern motorcycles already come with ABS braking. For many motorcycles it's also adjustable, for example switching off ABS in the rear while retaining it in the front, for those riding offroad and dirt.
Many bikes also come with cornering ABS, meaning that if the motorcycle is at an angle, the ABS comes in gradually.
Overall ABS is pretty much a "solved" problem right now, on motorcycles 2012+ at the very least. Earlier ABS wasn't that great. I had a BMW F800GS in 2010 and the ABS was horrible on bumpy roads. You basically had no braking if it kicked in.
Would you prefer to read a full list of EU member countries instead? As well as Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, ABS is also required in the UK.
I'm in South Africa, and most of the popular brands have ABS by default, including top sellers like BMW R1300GS, Honda Africa Twin, KTM 890. This is big adventure country, like Australia. I think the superbikes also have ABS now since about 10 years ago.
In Europe new motorcycles must have ABS on both wheels since 2017.
Its a good thing.
While it is possible to stop in less distance without ABS, in real live emergency situations ABS usually is of great help due to the no skill required, additional control.
For example if you take the sudden car running in front of you from a side road.
You will instinctively pull the brakes hard on a road with unknown slipperiness.
Maybe the car then stops in the last second or is really fast so there is space, then you need control to ride around the car.
You really don't want your rear wheel locking up and the bike going sideways or doing a stoppie on your front wheel which completely removes any way of obstacle avoidance.
The same is true if over breaking in a curve, if you can handle the bike standing up you can brake astonishingly hard in curves.
I would not recommend it though it feels really weird being slippery in a curve.
On rainy days i do even like traction control. It saved my ass a few times where i accelerated out of a curve a bit to enthusiastically on wet foliage.
ABS on a motorcycle is pretty great on the roadways. The issue I've heard from people is that it can't be disabled off road on many motorcycles. Most owners just unplugged the sensors entirely as a result, causing the system to indicate failure.
Don't know about general consensus, but I'm a big fan. I've had an emergency stop (deer ran out into the road) on a bike not equipped with it, and turns out that in an emergency I will just jam on the brakes and lock the wheels. Luckily I was going straight, and the bike stayed upright.
It’s not automatic braking. It’s automatically letting off the brakes for a fraction of a second to prevent locking up, aka anti-lock braking system
If it does kick in you get a slight pulsing on the leaver which means unless you are emergency braking, back off.
As far as the front goes, you never want the front to lock as you are almost certainly going down.
For off-road abs modes normally they turn rear off completely so you can deliberately lock it and decrease the sensitivity on the front but still keep the abs on for the front.
> It turned out that when I accelerate strongly, I pull the bike back, at some point in the rotation of the pedals. This is rightfully detected as a sudden deceleration of the bicycle.
I guess on a much heavier motorcycle the deceleration of the motorcycle is actually a meaningful indicator of the combination driver+motorcycle slowing down.
If only somebody would make motorcycles less noisy.. I dream of the day where there are neither mosquitos nor motorcycle noise. Two most annoying things during the summer.
There's an annoyingly persistent group of motorcycle enthusiasts that enjoys making as much noise as possible. They actively dislike electric motorcycles because they're not obnoxiously loud.
Then there are also the people that think they need to be loud to be noticed. That has been debunked, but that doesn't stop people from feeling a false sense of safety and sabotaging their vehicle's sound deadening regardless.
There are plenty of rules regarding the noise these things are allowed to make, but until law enforcement actually enforces those laws, nothing will change. That's with the unreasonably high legal noise limit.
I live next to a main road in London. As technology progresses, cars have gotten quieter, but for some reason motorcycles feel like they're becoming louder.
When I go read a book in the park, it's all very nice and quiet until a motorcycle arrives
When I want to sleep with the window open, if I hear any noise it's due to these motorbikes doing races at night.
If I was dictator for a year and didn't have policing resources to enforce noise control, I would just ban non-electric motorbikes
I can totally understand that bikers like to hear the engine and exhaust of their bike but physics and the design of motorcycles is not very accommodating to that.
My bike has the manufacturers default 94db idle exhaust.
It is 94db because anything louder than that is not allowed on certain nice Austrian roads, so the manufacturer set it to 94.
While driving i hear the wind noise on the helmet, the airbox, the drive train and a bit of the engine. I usually wear ear protection.
To be clear 94db is a lot and it is way more if you pull on the gas and i don't have one of those stupid valve controlled exhausts.
I am always astonished how freaking loud that thing is, when i hear it's exhaust echoing over open fields or while going through a tunnel at full tilt.
It just comes down to physics, the exhaust points not at the biker, so the noise is directed into the environment.
There is no engine bay covering the engine and gearbox so that is comparatively loud, also chaindrives are rather noisy as well.
For the exhaust to compete it must be incredibly loud, which of course is obnoxious.
Some modern (sports) cars play engine sounds via the stereo system, maybe someone can build something similar for bikers.
Current electric motorcycles can already be pretty silent, to the detriment of pedestrians. Some have added artificial noises because of this, like ones already used in cars.
The section 62 of the Highway Traffic Act says this:
> Intermittent red light restricted
> (14) Subject to subsections (14.1), (15) and (17.1), no person shall use a lamp, other than turning signal lamps or the vehicular hazard warning signal lamps commonly known as four way flashers, that produces intermittent flashes of red light.
There is an exemption for bicycles but not motorcycles.
Your site really needs a video :) I've run Hyperlites on my bikes forever (https://hyperlites.com/). I like them as they don't interfere with the original brake light, and provide additional lights higher up on the bike.
My motorcycle pet peeve is that if you ride bicycles routinely the control differences between bikes and motorcycles become potentially dangerous, especially while riding the motorcycle. I'm not sure how to align their controls more, but if your bike has a rotary handle shifter and one day on the motorcycle you "shift" with the throttle, it's not going to go well. There are a number of other possible control goofs you can do that aren't great.
I ride both regularly and I don't really have a problem switching between them. For me, the overall experience is so entirely different between the two, that my brain knows to treat them differently. Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.
(Blipping the throttle accidentally should never cause an emergency unless other things are already going wrong: for example, if you are riding a bike whose power is way beyond your skill level or you are following someone too closely.)
> Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.
My riding mower is tank-steer (zero turn)... pretty hard to use those skills on a car. But steering wheels basically work the same on all the equipment I've got with those; some easier to turn than others depending on geometry and power assist. The pedals are more likely to be different --- the mower has a friction lever on a panel to set the throttle / engine speed and levers you hold to go forward and back on right and left (so this does steering too); the tractor has similar throttle level, and then a pedal that you rotate to go forward or back with both wheels (all wheels if you put it into 4x4) and it has a splitable brake pedal if you want to brake on one side or the other.
But yeah; none of that makes it hard to go back and drive a car. Other than sometimes it'd be nice to do some tight turns at the expense of my tires if I could control each side individually.
I regularly swap between a scooter and motorcycle, owning both.
The big difference being left hand leaver on a motorcycle is the clutch, rear brake is right foot, on a scooter, no clutch so the left hand leaver is the rear break.
When I first got the scooter I was expecting the obvious accidental muscle memory confusion with the left leaver when swapping vehicles. For some reason it just never happened, never accidentally gone for the clutch on the scooter and never accidentally gone for the rear brake on the bike.
Another problem is that on most bycicles right leaver is the REAR brake, while on motoryclces it FRONT. It make difference when braking in turns. I was actually considering swapping my bike brakes left to right but it turns out one of the cables is too short. :(
The UK and Us drive on different sides of the roads and are taught to user different arms for signals as a result. If I'm going to turn I need to both slow down by using the brakes and signal to others. thus I want the rear brakes (even thought front can stop faster I don't want to risk losing traction on that wheel in traffic)
1991, first time riding a motorcycle... After a 15 minutes instruction course near the barn from which we extracted the 200 cm³ bike, off we were in Idaho's mountains. As a 15 years-old French person, the whole experience was exhilarating and it wasn't long before I started to relax and open the throttle a bit on the dirt track...
As an avid mountain bike cyclist back in France, I hung to what seemed familiar - which worked well enough until the first sharp bend came... It came way too fast, I panicked, cycling reflexes took over, I shifted my weight back and pressed both handle levers hard - getting the (to a cyclist) very unexpected result of both disengaging the clutch and thus losing all engine braking while locking the front wheel hard (why did they put the front break where the rear, which helps me control slides, is supposed to be ?)... I was catapulted, followed by the bike... Nothing broken - just bruises, rashes and the flattened ego of a lucky idiot.
As a daily cyclist, being a motorcycle passenger on big engines always terrifies me: I'm on two wheels, with bicycle-like positions and trajectories... But everything happens monstrously too fast, my instincts for braking and acceleration are all out of calibration, so I always feel that we cannot possibly survive the next turn !
So, yes - I recommend not mixing bicycling and motorcycling.
I standardize all my two wheeled vehicles to the motorcycle layout for this reason. It bothers my push bike friends to an amusing degree but it's much safer for me. Plus I feel I have greater control of the critical front brake with my most dextrous and strong hand.
I regularly ride both bikes and motorbikes and this never has been a problem, even though the lever that is the rear brake on the bike is the front brake on the motorcycle.
Engine braking with an internal combustion engine generates a vacuum in the intake manifold, because the throttle is closed while the pistons suck air.
(Performance cars sometimes have vacuum gauges to measure this. Aftermarket ones can be installed.)
A brake light could be rigged to activate past a certain a vacuum threshold. (There would be some false positives that are possibly not worth caring about.)
For all the engineering described in the article, I'm surprised it doesn't mention this possibility, if only to give reasons why it was discarded. (Maybe it's a bad solution; I have no ide!)
It seems that a vacuum-driven brake light could possibly have an advantage of kicking in faster than a motion detector, because it could trigger as soon as the revs are dropping with the throttle closed, before the clutch engages to actually connect the engine braking to the wheel.
I.e. blip-throttle before downshift -> vacuum kicking in / light comes on -> downshift completes, actual braking begins.
When talking about triggering over a certain threshold before the clutch is engaged, I'm guessing you mean detecting the hand throttle being let go particularly quickly after a downshift blip? I don't have any real evidence for this, but based on how I think I use the throttle when riding, I feel like this would have a very high false positive rate unless you're deliberately using the throttle very gently in normal riding; or a high false negative rate if you tune it so it only activates on really aggressive throttle blips. It would probably be more reliable to just trigger off high vacuum once the clutch has engaged.
Also, I'm not 100% sure but I don't think my bike has any vacuum tubing you could tap into - it doesn't have a vacuum brake servo like a car. So you'd have to drill into the intake manifold to mount a sensor.
I rode a Honda 350 for seven years starting with the Oil Crisis, before bike headlights even turned on automatically, although I kept mine lit. The biggest problem was other drivers not noticing me coming on or from the side, because compared to cars bikes were and still are rare on the road. They'd turn as I was passing their blind spot, or pull out in front of me from a cross street, etc. Seemed like I'd have a close call about once per week, but I don't recall ever having a threat of being hit from behind.
This was a great read — love how it blends real-world frustration with a builder’s mindset.
The insight about how little attention goes into motorcycle specific safety tech is spot on. The market tends to over-index on cars, but the stakes for motorcyclists are arguably higher per mile. Would love to see more open source or modular frameworks emerge in this space something others could build on top of, regionally or by use-case.
Curious if you explored anything around passive detection (weather, terrain, phone telemetry) or if most of your work focused on rider input and behavior?
This is something I want for all of my street bikes. I roll off the throttle a fair bit before grabbing the brakes on my Ruckus and way earlier on my modified Metropolitan. Always watching the mirrors while doing so. And my 1966 Sears ( made by Gilera ) only has a brake light switch on the rear brake pedal. I'm so conditioned to use the front brakes on a motorcycle that I often forget to tap the rear brake to signal other drivers. I'll be ordering 3 myself if they ship to the US, or getting my buddy in the UK to snag them for me.
In 2019 I was a bicycling a lot, and really wanted to get something with a motor, so I could be a bit faster/farther/not so sweaty with my trips. I had access to a car but rarely used it.
I really don't like many inherent safety issues with motorcycles and never seriously considered obtaining one, but kept wanting a two-wheeled vehicle with a motor.
I'd ridden a 50cc scooter in 2019 for a few days, and it was fine then, but I never considered one seriously since.
Eventually, in 2020 it was an emergency room doctor who suggested I look at 'real scooters' instead of the 50cc things.
So I did, eventually I ended up owning a 170cc scooter/moped thing, and it feels infinitely safer than a motorcycle, and a bicycle. I've done 20,000 miles on scooters since then, probably, all over the world,
including Denver to Canada and back once.
Cheaper lighter more efficient, than motorcycles. more stable, lower center of mass, better wind protection, useful storage options, too, compared to motorcycles and bicycles.
I ride mine year round, no issues.
I wrote a page trying to capture some of the upsides, but it's hard to get the tone right on the internet:
Why make such a definitive claim with zero evidence to back it up?
The justifications in that section are nonsense and seem to boil down to a skill issue on your part.
Sure, around the city a scooter makes sense for a lot of people, though I believe they provide a false sense of security. The lower barrier to entry also lowers the "perceived" risk.
Feeling safer !== safer
Personally, I feel much safer on one of my motorcycles than a scooter. But that's because I am extremely comfortable on a motorcycle and can make it do exactly what I want, when I want.
Scooters are great in the city, but they are kinda boring when it comes to touring or hitting the twisties. My dad's 200cc Vespa is just about interesting enough to ride on hills, but anything below that is just yawn.
Any marginal safety benefit you're getting from riding a scooter is being completely erased by the disregard for basic road safety principles shown in the footage.
Good example how to push forward and do the thing.
Otherwise, is it me or the info on the product page is a bit dry. No size specs, no instructions, not enough pics. It is like the last step to convert is not fully complete yet.
One of the issues usually is to make sure the part is compatible with the bike as otherwise you need to spend money to get it and then “try it”. The suggestion with tge pictures how to put it would be useful as well.
I like this! Have thought of it for both bikes and cars, I drive manual and occasionally just downchange coming up to lights or off motorways.
Also used to have a zx636 and bought an LED brake light that flashed obnoxiously when triggered (F1 style), I like to think the safety it added offset how annoyed I was probably making everyone behind me.
> “Moreover, during intense braking scenarios, it flashes proportionately to the braking intensity.”
In Europe, a lot of modern cars have a similar feature. When braking particular hard (eg: a sudden emergency stop from highway speeds) the brake lights will flash rapidly to warn drivers behind you. It’s a very good safety feature, IMO. But not legal in North America?
I use https://www.neutrinoblackbox.com/ for same with great success. I tapped my brake line electronics and the app lets me set up the sensitivity for when decelerating brightens them up. Also a lot of other fun features you can read about on their site.
Many of them flashy lights are just flashy. Some underregulated regions you'll quickly get tired of every car being like a christmas tree trying to one up each other what patterns their stop or turning lights do or how bright they are (and for front lights just how bright they are and how many).
This makes it an arms race because the average driver loses sensitivity and then what used to be enough is now too subdued and unsafe (even if technically enough by law). Reminds me of how some regions require ad breaks to have audio not louder than the main production, while others are just straight up loudness wars on your ears
There's something to be said for setting a standard and keeping driving competence high and being less annoying to others including pedestrians.
(A bike is a slightly different story, it's harder to see how far away is a solo light. But then this is also a culture where half the riders believe that deafening bystanders is important for safety so sometimes hard to sympathize)
I don't think you can have it both ways, either all lights are the same OR one is more important and drivers will all think first "is it this or that light? do I hit the brakes? maybe this means he is stopping slowly so I will risk my rear end for no reason?" before they act. I'm sure it isn't going to backfire
Where's the quest to make motorcycles a huge bit quieter? I am so fed up with all the loud motorcycles in my city. Seems pretty arrogant of people with loud vehicles to think that we all want to hear them.
This is an old problem that was solved and not solved. Most motorcycles in the past 25 years are decently quiet, unless you rev it up at night and everyone will hear it. But it is the same with the cars. At the same time, there is a significant number of motorcycles with non-street legal mufflers that add some decibels, you hear those even during the day at low revs.
I have 2 bikes, both stock exhaust, both quiet. The older one with the Euro 3 and larger engine is more quiet than the one that is Euro 5 and has a small engine, but none is loud enough to wake anyone at night if I come home at that time. At the same time, a couple of neighbors with fancy Akrapovic cans will wake up the entire street every time they pass by.
Alternatively, just switch to electric bikes maybe?
So that, even if they want to try and be noisy, they cannot really? (except with loud music maybe, but that's completely different, wayyyy less stressful for people around, and it's already possible so that would not add a new problem)
If anything modern motorcycles are sometimes a bit too quiet. The stock exhausts make them sound like cars when idling.
And low-revving engines can barely cut through the traffic noise.
Ok the kind of narrative you are pushing should definitely be banned along with the noisy machines themselves. As some have said in the comments, it has been debunked numerous times in studies.
With the same reasoning as yours, I'll have a 500W HiFi with speakers and subwoofers on me, shouting annoying and loud noise continuously while I walk in the streets? To be noticed when I cross as a pedestrian or on my bicycle?
Or, like, people could just careful?
Around me people drive carefully and they don't hurt cyclists or electric bikes.
I do very similar things manually already. I engine break and apply very light rear break pressure to trigger my break lights, and let off the rear break and reapply it for the “flashing” effect. Once at a complete stop and in neutral I flash my break lights off/on until the car behind me is at a complete stop.
The benefit of this is tool is that it reduces cognitive load while also working in emergency situations where I’m more focused on operating the motorcycle than signaling to others.
Out of curiosity, wouldn't an accelerometer alone not work for this purpose? I see you've hooked it up with engine RPM as well, but realistically you want to indicate when you're slowing down, no matter the reason, right? Is there something I'm fundamentally missing here?
This is a great idea though, and definitely something that more bikes should come stock with. There's a very clear benefit for safety.
Thank you for your question, it does not hook with the engine RPM, but I did have an issue with the sample rate syncing with the engine rpm therefore picking up noise, I solved that issue with randomizing the sample interval with pseudo random numbers.
Great idea. I thought about this when I rented an electric Renault car, and found that in regenerative braking mode… brake lights do not come on when lifting the foot off the accelerator. A friend in a car behind said he found it confusing and wondered what I was doing. Such a bizarre design flaw not to have brake lights come on when this happens.
Road bike tail lights have had IMU controlled brake light functionality for years. Even fairly cheap ones from Aliexpress. Example: https://youtu.be/iH-dYDkd_U0?t=123
It's a nice story. Some statistics might help motivate concern. E.g., The disproportionate risk per mile for motorcycling is chilling. But in California "rear end" as a category appears to be only about 15% of all MC accidents, and even then the category doesn't distinguish being hit from hitting.
I suspect a lot of the effort here is marketing, so you might extract extra value (and do more good) with a complementary product.
A big benefit might come from controllable red light and warning bell for the rider when you're more than 15% over speed limit. Speed is the biggest risk by far, and also the risk you can control (since no brake light can defend against the inattentive driver). It's way too easy to not realize how fast you're going.
Indeed, for that you could also factor in stopping distances. Starting out with lighter, nimble bikes, I got in real trouble with the 650+ lb monsters that dither about stopping. Those would get a lower threshold. And you'd apply a higher threshold for open road vs. traffic, etc.
Then build out a UI workflow and logging, and it might grow into an interesting intelligent copilot product line addressing all the pilot-controllable factors. As a motorcyclist, it's really on you to save your own bacon.
20 years riding bikes and I never knew I have this problem. Even now I don't have it. It sounds like a nice gimmick but not a solution to a real problem, at least not for European traffic where bikes are reasonably fine and where the top cause of motorcycle fatalities is riding way too fast.
This could help but the most dangerous situations I experienced myself were, when someone was coming from the side (perpendicular), especially on T-junctions.
Classic "sorry mate I didn't see you" case.
Not sure smart braking light in the back would help much here.
I've always felt safer in motorcycles compared to scooters. Something about the handling in scooters doesn't feel reassuring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's more apparent when you ride on patchy, broken roads. It's much easier riding over bumps, zigzagging to avoid potholes on a motorcycle. Of course, I'm comparing motorcycles and scooters of similar weight. Riding a litre class machine is a different dimension altogether.
I crashed recently after someone in front applied break too hard and too late. Couldn’t walk for two weeks—something like BrakeBright would’ve been a gamechanger. How do you prevent false triggers on bumpy roads though?
The issue with brake lights is they are binary on/off. It would likely be better if the brightness would vary by how hard the braking is. Like getting brighter and brighter and then rapidly flashing.
Every car would have to have the same brightness for their brake lights for this to work well. At night, cars in the US have their brake lights partially illuminated as running lights. On some cars these are so bright that it looks like they're actively braking.
Brightness would be hard to discern in the sun. Cars have center stop light strip, it would be cool if amount of illuminated segments would be proportional to deceleration. Probably not legal though.
I sold my bike and gave up riding because it was just too dangerous. It's not just that people don't see you, they're not even looking anymore, they're on their phones.
same as with cars - it seems the technology that is actually built in the products is just the annoying / useless ones instead of technology that would be actually useful e.g. to safety
That's actually brilliant. Same issue w/ some sports cars too or even cars coasting in slow stop and go traffic when coming up from behind from high speed traffic.
If you are thinking commercial you may want to look into IP issues to see if there are active patents (probably expired by now?)
As far as design choices, based on my journeys in similar types of projects: (just my$.02, not a critique)
USB will be a significant point of failure. The connector has voltage present and electrochemical activity will destroy the connector over time unless you can keep it in a clean, low humidity environment. Consider a different connector or a wireless SOC to eliminate this point of failure and make a completely potted unit possible. If you use usb, make sure there is no voltage normally present, even from the data connections, and you have a good watertight plug for the access port. Everything gets wet on bikes. Everything. nRF52840 or ESP32C3 would be my go to choices here, but there are a lot of excellent candidates. BLE is probably the protocol you will want to use. This will facilitate making a simple app to do firmware updates and feature adjustments.
Consider eliminating the need for RPM input. This will be a significant point of failure and your greatest installation headache across different motorcycles.
As a failsafe, control the lamp output pass-through with a pulled-up mosfet of at least 50a capacity (you won’t ever see this high current, but it protects from bulb changing short circuits and other unknowns)
An Infineon BTS5016-2EKA or its low side equivalent is probably a great choice, and gives you both of the switches you need in one package, for less than $3, with full protection features. ( I assume you will need one to interrupt existing signaling and one to light where’s there is no activation from the brake switches)
The main thing is the lamp must light with regular inputs even if the circuit loses power or the chip gets a hole drilled in it. If it comes on when it shouldn’t, that is also bad, but not as bad.
Idk what sensor you are using, but consider the icm20948, it’s not too expensive ($3-4) and it has onboard sensor fusion. Only downside is it’s 1.8v, but if you use the nRf52840 that’s not an issue. Even so, level conversion isn’t too big a deal. Sensor fusion will greatly simplify understanding what’s going on.
Since power consumption is not critical I would consider using an ML algorithm on the sensor data to detect hazard conditions, lie downs, etc and filter out steep uphill/downhill false activation/failure to activate.
You could collect the data easily and train a simple model with off the shelf tools designed specifically for doing that kind of thing with MCUs. I forget the name but it’s commonly used for voice action or gesture training. You might want to train on a few bikes though, especially ones with different vibration frequencies.
Now you can add a subscription model for premium flashing features and “enhanced AI” with in-app GPT4 access to an interactive tour guide and a “best rides” feature customized to your riding style and search history! Business could pay-to play, and insurance companies, motorcycle manufacturers, and tire sellers would love that personally identifiable riding data! (Please, don’t)
I was only thinking about bikes, but I lift/downshift in my BRZ all the time. I guess there is much less fear of being mangled by a cel phone user when I'm in the car. Looks like I will be ordering 4 of these.
That requires you to have a bike where the current gear is recognized digitally and the bike has a standard way of getting that data to an external device (or it requires you to put a sensor on the gear lever). For that matter, it requires you to have a bike with a manual transmission. There's lots of electric bikes, bikes with fully automatic transmissions, and bikes that simply don't have the electronics (not to mention a standard way to interface with them).
Actually in thinking about it, if you had access (digitally) to the current gear, you probably also have tachometer and velocity data as well through whatever that connection is anyway.
On the other hand, a motion sensor works for all bikes and is quite robust.
You can infer the gear based on vehicle speed and engine speed.
That's how gear indications work on most manual cars too: there's no actual sensor telling what gear is selected (other than reverse, and sometimes clutch pedal and neutral).
An existing brake light product, the Billy light from Clearwater, integrates with the BMW canbus to pull the bike's acceleration data and use that as a basis for what this light appears to do.
I can imagine there's enough of a market for BMW accessories that they can make it work, but if you want to address other bikes with the same device, you need a different approach.
Agreed, I was more responding to the idea of tying into existing sensors or motorcycle data as noted above. The light I mentioned is part of a bigger lighting system that works through a CAN interface and has all kinds of control of settings through a somewhat convoluted overlay on existing bike inputs, like press this switch, then these, then turn the wonder wheel to adjust brightness.
EV’s need this too! I’m noticing my Tesla isn’t doing a great job turning on the brake lights during one pedal driving. It seems to need pretty hard deceleration before they come on.
I actually think it is lame when engine braking activates the brake light. There are two distinct behaviors: slowing down gently, with engine braking, and slowing down intensely with physical brake application. When I am engine braking like going down a long hill I do not want to flag the drivers behind me that I am braking ... I just want to use the compression of the engine to regulate my speed. Anyone who lives in a mountainous area will tell you this. Seeing solid brake lights going down the hill is a red flag / skill issue. Some manufacturers have begun to add artificial brake lights during engine braking though and I find it disingenuous.
I’m trying to understand this comment - are you saying that there’s an advantage to drivers behind you not thinking you’re braking? As in - you don’t want them to think you’re coming to a complete stop when you’re regulating your speed?
Or are you saying that you don’t want them to think you have a skill issue ?
I live in a semi mountainous area, where people driving automatics ride their brakes most of the way down the mountains.
(Relatively small mountains, elevations ranging from 1,900-2,700 with the surrounding area around 1,000-1,100 elevation. So not the same necessity of engine braking as somewhere out west where the elevation is 3-6k average with mountains up to 12-14k).
engine braking is not braking - is what I am trying to imply
holding your speed or decellerating mildly is not the same as braking. if i gear down into a higher rpm and hold my speed, or perhaps decel ever so slightly - its not worth alerting the driver behind you. most people over-react to brake lights and will see your brakes as "I should apply brakes too" when in this particularly case, they should not.
I can't think of a single circumstance where compression braking should cause a brake light to illuminate. the rate of decelleration is so small compared to even a gentle tap of the brakes, that it will merely confuse drivers behind you.
I think perhaps this may be different drivers. The scenario I dislike is that drivers seem to fly up behind me, and then brake even heavier, when I’m using engine braking and then tailgate for a period. (For example, I’m going 40 in a 35, and they flew up behind me going 60).
If I tap my brake lights as they’re approaching, they slow more gradually and follow at an appropriate distance.
This is anecdotal of course.
I think the issue is that I’m using engine braking, while those around me are not.
When one is driving downhill with a car in gear, one is maintaining speed, not slowing down. Hence there is no need to show a brake light.
Driving down a long hill using (friction) brakes to maintain your speed is a quick way to cause excessive wear on your brakes and, in extreme cases, lead to overheating and brake fade or failure.
This is required knowledge for the UK driving test BTW.
Sorry - I should clarify I downshift. I understand the difference. I drove manual most of my life. (Somewhat unusual in the USA )
However, I frequently see drivers fly down the mountain behind me, and then brake heavily. The drivers in front of me, have their brake lights on in front of me usually the entire time or nearly.
However: high compression engines will slow you at a rate similar to light braking in many circumstances, unless your gearing and the slope of the hill is just right.
On my motorcycle, if I’ve downshifted to an amount that it will stop acceleration due to the slope, it will begin to decelerate me.
Even in my current car, the difference between 3rd and 4th is 4th allowing the car to continue to accelerate to ~20 mph over the speed limit, where 3rd will hold briefly but begin to decelerate the vehicle as the slope decreases.
While I can shift between them to moderate the speed, it’s not always worthwhile. Again, I’m applying specific scenarios where the “mountain” road is maybe 1-1.5 miles maximum.
The specific scenario I dislike is that if I’m using engine braking(say to maintain 35-43 mph in a 35 zone), and don’t tap my brake lights - people fly down doing 60, and the brake heavily, tailgate for a period, and then follow at a normal distance.
If I tap my brakes to trigger the lights as they approach, they begin to slow further away and don’t do the hard slowdown.
Anecdotal of course.
The difference may be that where I am in the USA many people are not using engine braking.
thanks for your comment, the device is self leveling, I live in a hilly Scotland, it keeps adjusting itself with the slopes and only reacts to sudden changes.
"Committed to empowering users, I developed a subsequent version incorporating a USB port. Currently, I’m finalizing user-friendly software utilities, enabling riders to easily update BrakeBright firmware, customize features, and personalize the system to match individual riding styles and preferences."
A brake light that requires system administration?
When I was commuting daily in the SF fog, I discovered that putting on of these [1] on my helmet did wonders to keep cars further off my tail. It moves the brake light up to eye level for people in SUVs and also triggers on engine braking.
Wish it were cheaper, but was a worthwhile investment for me.
Also, consider looking into airbag vests if you ride regularly. Also expensive but (supposedly) make a huge difference in crash outcomes.
[1] https://www.brakefreetech.com/products/brake-free
Motorcycle fatality rates have been trending upwards, not downwards[1]. Brake lights on helmets may illuminate one of the culprits: An ever increasing number of American trucks with poor visibility. Sitting on a bike, you're even shorter than a pedestrian and more likely to be completely out of sight. Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility, as Europe has done.
[1]https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
As an almost-daily motorcyclist with 15k miles on my current machine (Suzuki DL650), I absolutely agree that the increased proportion of pickup trucks on the road increases the risks for riders, however I suspect it is mainly because the larger, heavier vehicles aggravate the effects of a general deterioration in driving skills and attitudes. One thing about riding a motorcycle is that you are, unless you have a death wish, an active and observant participant in what you are doing, which alone separates you from a seeming majority of those driving cars and trucks. You become much more aware of what others on the road are doing, and what they are doing, in large numbers, is acting like twits.
Driving crazily fast in residential areas, rolling through stop signs, blowing off yellow and even red lights, ignoring turn signals, aggressively tailgating cars, trucks, even motorcyclists like myself, tapping away at their phones and steering with their knees. I think I see just about every variation of all of these things at least several times a week, to the extent that I have thought about the idea of creating some kind of org or foundation or even just a blog to advocate a return to taking driving seriously. I don't have a lot of confidence that I could make a difference though. I suspect a lot of the problem is simply many more cars on infrastructure that we haven't put enough money into for decades, but I'm no expert.
It's a really complicated issue, but you might find some of stuff related to Strong Towns, 15 minute cities, and sorta general modern urbanist things interesting. If we had better transit, more connected communities etc, people who are less interested in driving and driving well would have other options than hours long commutes.
[Answer scope limited to the US]
The problem is that these people want to drive, and don't care about it. They want to drive for sociological reasons - driving is seen as a symbol of American independence and financial stability. Look at the people who get weird reactions because they chose to walk to work, or schools that object on spurious grounds when they walk their kid to school.
The car is seen as an assumption, a bare minimum. And any attempt to replace it is taking away a personal right.
I think these are really the same thing looked at from opposite side of the circle. When all of your coworkers are driving 45 minutes in on the highway because nothing is local to good housing, public transit isn't available at all, or the public transit available is so bad (in multiple ways) as to beg questions why you'd use it, then it drives the sociological assumptions about other types of transport in the same way the mindset itself drives the conditions which lead to even more assumptions.
One could say it's that people need to want to see better public transit as a good idea for normal people or one could say it's that public transit needs to be made better so people see it that way. In both situations, it's when public transit actually gets improved anything will actually change.
I don't think this is limited to the US, I have exactly the same viewpoint as a Brit and so do many people I know.
People like walking to work and like taking the tube after a night out, but ultimately, the car is just vastly more convenient and comfortable for such a large amount of stuff.
You may as well ask me to give up running water because technically I could just carry it from the well.
Realistically if public transport advocates want progress they need to demonstrate that they also understand the utility of cars because otherwise they come across as simply being wilfully ignorant.
I think there are two different things though, and in the UK the bar is (mostly) just a practical one.
Lots of my colleagues cycle to work, because the cycling infrastructure is great (both from Cambridge City, and from my employer). For those along the Guided Busway corridor, quite a few get to work like that because it is convenient.
Step 1 is to make the public transport good enough so that it is at least as good as taking a car. But the US has Step 2 - convince people that they aren't looking poverty stricken if they take a bus.
I find those authoritarian "people should live their lives how we want them to" sites more annoying than anything. They also tend to be overly dismissive of residential solar, EVs, rural life and homesteading
A friend of mine is a volunteer fireman. Since the fire engine sits higher than just about anything, he can see what people are doing behind the wheel in their SUVs. I’d be shocked, he reports, to know just how many of them are absorbed in their devices while driving.
And since using your device while driving can mean a hefty fine -at least where I live- most of them do it by lowering/turning their gaze from the road so that the device stays more hidden instead of lifting the device and keeping their eyes "mostly" ahead.
It's just so stupid...
I recognise this picture. For example I remember when I used to commute by motorcycle getting cut off by a guy driving a van who had his phone clamped in the crook of his neck and was writing something in a notepad with a pencil and steering with a combination of the notepad and his knees. This is turning at a really busy junction in London[1] during rush hour traffic.
[1] just south of the river at Vauxhall bridge
> I don't have a lot of confidence that I could make a difference though.
My recent conclusion is that efforts are worth it even if we're pessimistic about outcome. Often times it is hard to get positive feedback from people you're helping to consider their own behavior even if they don't acknowledge you.
I am not a motorcyclist but I have to agree with your assessment based on my personal experience driving. The risks that morons take while driving is absurd, but I've seen how it affects motorcyclists more. I once saw a motorcyclist nearly get hit because they were being tailgated by a driver and another driver want to pass the tailgater, thinking they were just a slow driver. So the other driver speeds up and attempts to cut off the tailgater, only to realize at the last moment there was a motorcycle there.
After see that, I make sure to give any motorcycle I'm behind an extra buffer of space to make sure I'm not obstructing anyone's view of them.
Yes, driving has become a necessity for everyday life in most places, but we need to pump the brakes and remind everyone it is a privilege, not a right.
Vision Zero exists and its entire output, at least in the US, seems to be some somewhat clever yard signs and good vibes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
> its entire output, at least in the US, seems to be some somewhat clever yard signs and good vibes
That's confusing to me. Many cities have worldwide have implemented vision zero techniques and saved many lives, including in the US.
i agree with this esp. when the parent linked a wiki page that, if you go beyond the single photo on the page and read it, is completely counter to the comment.
i'm confused too, but ty parent for making me aware of vision zero.
The USA is an anomaly amongst developed countries:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-tr...
Live expectancy is also dropping in the US, it's notably different to other developed countries.
> a general deterioration in driving skills
Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to.
My gut feel is that people drove very badly in the before-times but often also very slowly and cautiously at the same time. Speed felt dangerous in old vehicles. Modern computers with wheels are like living rooms with great acceleration and decelaration. Maneuvers which would had taken great skill to perform with an old rear-wheel drive car with bad tires, are now executed routinely like it's nothing, thanks to antispin, traction control etc etc.
Cars are much safer now, especially on the inside, but when you get hit on the outside by a several tonne projectile, it's about the same as it ever were.
this is definitely a big part of it. in the past, cars were either small with tiny engines or big "boats" with massive engines and super soft suspension. those old suspensions weren't really about control - they were for comfort or just trying to deal with all that weight. now basically every car, no matter the size, comes with lighter parts, way smaller but way more powerful engines, smarter computers, better tires, and most importantly, way better suspension. all that means a lot more grip, way faster acceleration and braking, and a much bigger feeling of control - even for people who might not be paying full attention (or really know what they’re doing).
we've kind of made every car a sports car, and that means when people make mistakes, those mistakes get out of hand way quicker before physics wins.
then there’s the whole manufacturer's arms race - the classic prisoner's dilemma. trucks and suvs just keep getting bigger, faster, heavier, packed with screens and gadgets. all the old luxury stuff is standard everywhere now. so everyone is more and more isolated from the actual consequences of bad driving ... until they're not.
>> Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to.
It is from my experience as a rider, as I said in my post, but there are also plenty of studies showing increased deaths and injuries among pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
I think cars becoming safer has ironically driven a lot of this behaviour. People feel safe themselves and don't take care. It's called risk compensation.
I agree modern cars are much better engineered to increase passenger survivablity.
Can’t remember the program (it was a very long time ago) but the crash investigation expert said a 6 inch spike on the driver steering wheel would improve driver’s perception of risk as it would be a very pointed reminder of risk.
I don't think that's what's motivating people. Nobody was dying in droves before. The expected outcome of the mean and median example of distracted driving been purely financial ever since cars grew seatbelts and accidents are more expensive than ever. There's probably some other explanation, though I have no clue what.
And I also noticed it's impossible to chat on the phone while riding a motorcycle due to heavy gloves :)
> Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility
I argue we should start with the A-pillar. It's not just the big fat American trucks. Every car that is allowed to roll onto the streets is required to have a certain amount of airbag and the push for this seems to have really bad side effects on aspects of safety for everyone not inside the vehicle.
Look at the visibility difference in a 1980s pickup truck and compare it to 2024 model year anything and you would likely feel claustrophobic pretty quickly.
> Perhaps its time to start regulating for better visibility
I wish my town in NY would ENFORCE laws for tinted windows. It’s epidemic. As a moto rider I rely on being able to see the driver, because if you can’t see their face, they can’t see you.
Of course you can’t see the driver’s face if their car windows are blacked out.
I recently had to frantically wave at a driver about to turn right over a child in the crosswalk. He literally could not see them from his vantage point in his giant SUV.
When I am sitting on my motorcycle I am taller than most people's sitting position in their trucks. While filtering I can look down into their vehicles and see what they're doing on their phones.
At first glance I want to strongly disagree, but who am I to argue with your experience.
What bike do you ride, and what vehicles are you calling trucks? Specifically.
Kind of meta, but you deserve recognition for this demonstration of self-awareness. You expressed skepticism politely, then asked specific questions instead of making assumptions. Sometimes HN gives me hope for the rest of the internet.
An F750GS and a DRZ400SM are my main bikes (out of an entire garage full of stuff). For trucks I'm talking about F-150s and similar.
Do those two bikes have a higher / more upright riding position that a typical sportbike?
Sportbikes are lower, but they're not typical. Sportbikes sales trended way down over the past decade, with models being discontinued entirely in some regions. Current sporty-style bikes are generally more upright seating and share engines and platforms with non-sport models. Dual sport/off road bikes have trended upwards, even for riders who never go off pavement, because they're cheap to run and very practical as general purpose motorcycles. More recently, there's been a trend towards large touring bikes as well.
https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/motorcycle-industry-q1...
Yes your enduros and such are taller than sport bikes, but a Harley would be much lower, yes?
Somewhat yeah, the GS is a tall bike for sure. I have a zrx1200 and I'm still a ton taller than when I am in the miata. Miata is probably one of the lowest riding vehicles you can get and headlights are a problem at night shining in my eyes, where on the motorcycle it is not an issue.
I don't have a brake light on my helmet on motorcycle but I added DOT-C2 tape to the back and sides of it, stuff like this: https://www.amazon.com/THKULKME-Reflective-Reflector-Waterpr...
I see, thanks for the info. I’m licensed but haven’t owned a bike in years.
Do we have stats on whether more sports bike riders are involved in crashes that bikes with better visibility?
Not really. Outside of a few groups at places like Virginia Tech, motorcycle safety studies don't get much funding. Too niche.
You can use insurance rates as a loose proxy- sportbikes are between one and three orders of magnitude more expensive to insure than adventure bikes, touring bikes or cruisers. But I suspect that has more to do with the average age of the riders.
And bike power. Sportsbikes are often road-legal versions of actual racing bikes, with all that it entails. If a third of cars on the road were tuned-down Ferraris and McLarens, you bet they'd crash left right and center.
Yeah, bike power has increased significantly. Iirc the age distribution of fatal crashes is double peaked, with one peak in the 20s from young riders who don’t know what they’re doing yet, and another in the late 40s or so from older riders who haven’t ridden in 20 years but still think they know what they’re doing. The skills needed to handle a modern 600cc sports bike with 160+ hp are on another level compared to the skills needed for a 600cc sports bike from the 90s with 110hp.
Also slower reaction times (and less testicular fortitude!) in someone older, along with the lack of practice.
There are some situations you can get yourself out of (and many more you can get into!) as a 20 something that will just outright result in death when you’re older.
Source: rode a 1400cc bike for almost a decade, awhile ago. Never went above 140mph on it though.
Weirdly, an adventure bike with higher horsepower will have cheaper insurance than a race replica with less horsepower.
Kinda. Power delivery is wildly different between an ADV and a sports bike.
On a sorta dual sport like a Kawasaki KLR650 you get peak torque from the engine at around 2500 RPM, which is comfortably in school zone speed limit territory.
Something like the Yamaha R6 won't really start feel like it's pulling until you get the engine above 8000 RPM at least and then you getting peak torque until around 12,000 RPM. By then you're doing 70kph to 90kph in first gear.
Sports bikes are more comfortable ridden aggressively. Unfortunately that also gives a lot of riders a false sense of skill; right until they moment run into a situation above their skill level and they crash while panicking.
A 1300GS has significantly higher horsepower than an R6, variable valves so it pulls across the rev range, and yet still costs a fraction of an R6's insurance cost; it would appear that the riders have a much larger role in the premium than the engine.
Doesn't seem that weird to me. Having lots of horsepower available doesn't mean you have to use it. Conversely, having only modest horsepower is still more than enough to drive at a truly reckless speed on most if not all roads. The psychology of the biker, their inclination to go fast, plays a more important role than the raw horsepower statistic. It seems safe to assume that people who deliberately purchase a race replica, even one with only modest horsepower, are more likely to go way too fast.
In any case, insurance companies have a monetary incentive to go by the data. Whatever the cause, they evidently have data that says race replicas correlate with insurance claims.
Absolutely. I have a meagre Honda ADV 350 with some 28 HP (can't start biking on higher models in Europe, first 2 years its this or lower level), and hell 0-50kmh is blisteringly fast, 50-90kmh still much faster than our BMW with 245HP in sports mode. Sure above 100kmh it gets slower but I use it for non-highway commute, winding roads through vineyards and such so I don't even ride it that way. It makes bike much lighter while its pretty big for a big guy like me, and being nimble is priceless for enjoyment and safety too.
I literally don't need more, it becomes just an ego or emotions game. Faster only gets you to places way sooner than other drivers expect you to, massively increasing risk exposure.
I think you mean one and three times more expensive. 3 orders of magnitude is 1000 times more expensive!
Yeah... I've gotten quotes with that kind of spread between "old man" bikes and very fast sport bikes. IIRC if you buy a cruiser or certain ADVs the insurance company expects to never hear from you with a claim, while certain sport bikes, the insurance expects you to total it within 18 months.
Yes. The DRZ especially is a dirt bike which is noticeably higher set than a supersports. You pay for it a bit in on-road manoeuvrability though.
Mine is the SM, which is a little shorter, but is ultra-maneuverable, far more so than a normal street bike.
"sumo is love, sumo is life"
Hello fellow dizzer enjoyer
You either don't live in the US/Canada or you don't ride in areas where people drive full-size and "heavy duty" pickup trucks. The Ford F250 for example has a roof that's 7 feet high.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/10vb432/f250s_just_...
The roof on the old F150 is barely above the door sill on the new truck.
...and then people go and put bigger rims and lift kits on them.
I wish the USA had similar regulations to Australia where modifications require engineering signoff - typically these lifted trucks would fail a rollover test amongst other broken standards (wheelbase wider than the vehicle, for example).
Australia where there's no enforcement of that engineering signoff if it's done after the initial sale.
or where ADR non compliant vehicles are fine because they're imported under the low volume\non manufacturer paths. (there's more than a few tosser owned gmc denali with lifts that bring the bonnet up to 1.7ish metres)
>Sitting on a bike, you're even shorter than a pedestrian and more likely to be completely out of sight.
Not true at all except for the lowest-sitting cruisers. Most bikes put you eye level with an SUV driver and taller bikes above.
Can you explain why?
I see other people saying the same thing, but it totally defies my intuition.
Isn't the seat in an SUV objectively much higher up than the seat of a bike? Aren't your feet much higher on the floor of an SUV, than on a bike?
What am I missing here?
They are not. You step up over the sill to get into an SUV, then your feet go down into the footwell. Your eyes end up slightly lower than a person standing (and much lower in a sedan), while a motorcycle is very close to exactly standing (they have to be able to put their feet down when stopped).
Thank you!
Very much depends on the style of motorcycle. Sitting on my dual-sport BMW F650GS[1] I can see well over sedans on the road and this is with a slightly lowered version of it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_G650GS
The vast majority of motorcycle crashes are due to excessive speed and inexperience of the rider. Also a car turning into the lane and failing to see the oncoming bike causes many, many accidents.
I ride in Spain, and I don’t know anything about “better visibility” requirements” compared to the U.S. — out here there are giant trucks everywhere: delivery vehicles, industrial trucks, and even Ford Raptors. My close calls have almost always been exclusively with small VW Golf and the SEAT equivalents — distracted, young drivers are (anecdotally) the biggest culprits.
Also in the U.S., you’ll have some 18 year old kid on an R1 that has no business being on an R1, often killing themselves because they think they are Fabio Quateraro at 2am.
I could be wrong, but I’m not seeing data suggesting that “big trucks” in the U.S. are causing more motorcycle deaths. When I drove a Suburban in the U.S., my visibility was far better than when I had a Maserati car. Being able to see over cars allowed me to see more easily when a moto was approaching from the front or rear.
If you want to improve moto safety in the U.S., you need harsher laws against distracted driving, you also need potentially a graduated motorcycle license system like they do in Europe so you don’t have rookies running 1000cc bikes when ten minutes of riding experience.
Trucks are not really the problem.
In Ireland, you can't ride a motorcycle above 125cc unless you've held your license for four years. It forces people to get genuine experience before hopping on a litrebike and sending it.
I think distraction and lack of experience is the main issue regardless of the vehicle.
Also there is a big difference I think with proper motorcyclists who actually get teached how to ride a bike, anticipate drivers behavior and act as if you were invisible at all time, with people riding <125cc motorcycles and moped with a car driving license who just don't take proper safety measures. I see so many 125cc riders overtaking on the right side, splitting lanes at excessive speed without anticipating a driver deciding to switch lanes, etc. Whenever I see a motorcycle rider down in an urban area it is usually on a 125cc or lower scooter.
Exception being the Yamaha T-Max users. They are supposed to have a motorcycle license but they all ride like complete retards with no exception. I think there is something in the nature of that bike, noise combined to instant throttle response and userfriendlyness of the clutchless/gear variator system that attract only the most stupid people of this planet. Yamaha should be ashamed of this.
> Motorcycle fatality rates have been trending upwards, not downwards
Doesn't seem to be the case in the UK [1], but I don't think we have nearly as many large vehicles as in the US.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Fatality rates for all vulnerable road users have skyrocketed in the US. You're three times more likely to die if you're a pedestrian and struck by an SUV than a passenger car. They're also horrifically bad for congestion and pollution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
And trucks and SUVs continue to further dominate the marketplace with some automakers no longer selling sedans at all, making it increasingly difficult to not buy an SUV or "crossover."
Those trucks and SUVs, particularly those made by American and Japanese companies, are focused on "aggressive" looks, which means a giant, angry looking, flat-face nose which is incredibly lethal when hitting a person.
https://www.indieauto.org/2022/11/28/designer-of-2020-gmc-si...
"The front end was always the focal point. The rest of the truck is supporting what the rest of the truck is communicating… we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel, but not in a boyish way, still looking mature. It just had to have that imposing look."
And of course who do these vehicles appeal to? What kind of behavior do they encourage? Every time I'm tailgated it's some dickhead in one of these giant angry-faced trucks.
It's taken the auto "journalists" a while to catch up but they're finally pointing it out:
https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/mean-machines...
What's interesting is fatality rates are increasing but injury rates are decreasing.
Seems like something else might be at play. If it is more SUVs and Pickups then I think a brake light helmet would do a lot considering the danger those cars present is being harder to see those below them. But if it is something else, then maybe not as good of a solution.
That seems unfortunately unsurprising. With shorter vehicles (sedans), when you get hit (as a pedestrian, bicyclist, motorcyclist), you are more likely to be pushed over the hood of the car. But with a taller vehicle (truck, SUV), you're more likely to either be propelled forward after hitting the high, flat face of the grille, or get pulled and dragged under the vehicle.
While going over the hood is going to hurt, and can kill you, the other options are much more likely to kill you.
Vehicles with a tall, flat face are more likely to kill instead of injure, from my recall of previous discussions on HN. That's been a trend in vehicle design for a few years now.
Fortnine did a video on Grilles That Kill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU
They're hideous too.
We desperately need vehicle safety regulations which consider pedestrians and cyclists.
Trucks in particular are apparently being purposed built to kill.
It's more complex than that.
The bulbous styling on your average "we would have called this a station wagon 40yr ago but now we call it an compact SUV because stupid laws" vehicle is driven in large part by a need to have big floofy plastic moldings full of airspace for a "soft" place for a pedestrian to land.
On the other hand you've got stuff like the Chvey 2500HD trucks that everyone screeches about that aren't designed that way and will propel a pedestrian back onto the pavement.
There was a news story this week in my area about a car driver who intentionally side-swiped a motorcyclist. The police said what normally kills motorcyclists is that they get thrown and then they hit something solid like a barrier or another car. This guy got lucky that there was an exit nearby and he just slid down the exit lane with minor injuries.
Fatality rates are actually pretty flat I would say if you look at the relative numbers.
Some “militant” urban cycling commuters do things like attach a pool noodle horizontally and vertically to create space and visibility. I’d probably hazard a guess that avoiding highway miles also lowers your risk profile substantially.
Freeway driving tends to be the safest driving, in any vehicle. This is because speed deltas are typically low, and there are no cross-streets or stopping.
https://safetrec.berkeley.edu/2023-safetrec-traffic-safety-f... (Ctrl+F "Crash Location of Motorcycle Fatal Crashes")
I think the confusion may be that you commented on freeway safety, whereas the comment you replied to discussed highway safety. Freeways are limited access highways; not all highways are freeways.
That's a regional difference in terms. I would generally call a limited access highway, a "highway".
https://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/big-fast-road.j...
'Freeway' is a regional term, but the Federal Highway Administration describes them as limited-access with directions of travel separated by a barrier.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/processes/statewide/relate...
The Federal definition of highway is basically any public road.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
Yes and I believe when OP said highway they meant it colloquially, as in a freeway, hence using that term in my reply. A highway wouldn't really make sense since it encompasses just about every road, as you say.
Limited vs controlled access.
Nobody is cycling on either unless there's dedicated infra anywhere even the slightest bit urban. In rural areas cycling on a limited access road is generally "fine"
Complex thing to analyze, no?
Most Americans use freeways, and most do not use motorcycles. It's always hard to compare a rare thing to a common thing, it always has surprising problems. It's like when people on Reddit worry about radon in their basement, but the incidence rate of whatever cancer it was associated with is so low anyway.
What about agency? "Don't worry about kids choking on Legos, kids don't die from choking on Legos" - but that's because parents well informed and really vigilant about it, compared to say batteries. Motor riders avoid freeways.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. There are plenty of statistics available showing that freeway driving is the safest driving vehicles do. There's not as much available for motorcycles specifically, which is why I dug up a relevant link and shared it. It seems to hold true for MCs too (and I have no reason to suspect it wouldn't.)
I had not heard of/seen the pool noodle idea - looks like a simple and effective way to draw attention to cycling safety.
Here's a video of the NYC Pool Noodle Bike Ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97YJOQRQ4Ds&ab_channel=Stree...
The fact that people describe someone on a bicycle placing less than a pound of foam sticking out from their bicycle, usually shorter than the legally mandated passing distance, as "militant" when trucks and SUVs are purposefully designed by car companies to look as aggressive and angry as possible, really tells why US vulnerable road user safety is plunging while European vulnerable road user safety is going up.
“Looking” aggressive is irrelevant.
It was tongue in cheek
Sitting on my bike, I am taller than any pedestrian. I have visibility and I am visible over most European cars. Just saying.
I helped Alex invent that product! I built the first prototype that helped him get funding and hand assembled some of the first PCB designs. My (old) name is on the patent.
I’m glad to see this was already posted. I wear mine when I ride my 1500w ebike around and I feel so much safer with it. It’s really bright too!
That's cool. What principles is it based on and was it difficult to clean up the signals to get a reliable input?
I did not write the production code but I imagine they are tracking the velocity and acceleration vectors using a kalman filter and lighting up the lights when acceleration is negative in the direction of travel. By tracking the velocity vector in addition to acceleration one can eliminate the effects or the driver turning their head. I.e you are not just looking for a specific accelerometer axis to go negative, you have to use a more complex filter to determine the actual physical direction of travel of the device even as it rotates, and check for negative acceleration in that direction. To learn more:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_AHRS
https://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-fuse-motion-sensor-data-in...
I got one for my birthday! What a great product. It does exactly what it says it does, and has no more complexity than required.
Yussss I’ve been really impressed that Alex has made such a solid product. He was starting up just as my business failed and I warned him it can be a difficult road, but he stuck with it and has delivered something really special.
I have a smiley face rendered in retroreflective tape on the back of mine. I figure it's both bright and triggers the very sensitive human visual system for detecting faces. It's hard to say how much it helps, especially since I put it on basically the same time I started riding at all, but I don't often have people tailgating me. ed: and it was only a couple bucks, that's nice.
When I was into road cycling I find having a banana sticking out my rear jersey pocket would make drivers treat me better. I later saw a study that drivers think cyclists are less human, so my theory is it reminded them that I am, in fact, just a person using the road.
Alas, even the banana stopped working, though. Road cycling is horrible now. Too many cars.
Riding with a pannier does wonders to reduce close passes. The more drivers see you as a person on a bicycle rather than as a vehicle, the better.
Another reason may be that they are more concerned about scratching their paint than they are about your well-being.
Nice idea! Cars owner sometime use a "children inside" sticker. Won’t work for a solo bike obviously but wonder if some other messages might be effective like "Dad of toddlers", "I might be a cop", "vulnerable human"… the smiley is easier to read through.
I have a negative visceral reaction to the "baby on board" stickers on cars. It feels really entitled; to me it says, "be extra careful with me, because my small child is more deserving of safety than other people".
That's unnecessary.
Think more like "I can be really distracted and suddenly swerve because my toddler threw their drink at me".
Like with L-plate drivers. Be very careful, don't hate, they're just danger to themselves and everyone else around. They're not entitled, they're warning.
Yeah I get the logic but its still flawed and wrong (saying this as a father of 2 small kids who drives them around frequently).
You either are road-worthy driver who can drive safely or not. L ones are an approved exception and the list and law and expectations ends right there.
Nobody is babysitting 27 categories or potentially distracted or otherwise dysfunctional drivers. If you can't drive safely either have somebody else drive, use public transport or stay home. No excuses, you can very easily kill people including your own kids.
I interpret them similarly. I also think, "I might be lacking sleep, in a hurry, or have way too much on my mind."
Becoming a parent brought upon quite an increase in my empathy for other parents.
If you'd like to be less unnecessarily cynical, you can instead read it as "there's someone in the vehicle who is more fragile, and less likely to survive an accident."
I’d like to see it like that too but we don’t observe much « oldie inside » stickers. I don’t think he’s cynical and understand the sticker as a polite way to say the driver have more care for his baby than others human being, which is not to blame of course.
IIRC it's also there so that in the case of an accident, people will look for the baby in case it's trapped somewhere or somehow left the car.
Then there's the guy in the "armed cyclist" jersey who goes on a cross-country ride every year.
heh, or you could join an OMC (outlaw motorcycle club) and get patched up * for an implied 'i will literally kill you if you get close to me'
* don't do this
Ha, I have heard a couple motorcyclists sincerely recommend open-carrying a gun to scare off murderous asshole drivers (which, to be clear, absolutely exist). Neither of those options are on my to-do list though. :)
IMO, there are very few circumstances where "more guns" is an improvement. I don't think introducing guns to motorvehicle altercations is one of them.
Anyone who open carries anywhere other than the wilderness or in the field while hunting is at best an attention whore with main-character syndrome . . . at best.
What's more, notwithstanding the freakouts from Europeans and blue-staters about so-called "gun culture," you have no right to employ a firearm anywhere in the US unless someone is actively threatening to kill or maim you or a person near you. Not because you got in a road-rage pissing contest.
If anything, bringing a gun into a situation like that is a great way to get a felony assault/brandishing charge and lose your ability to own a gun period.
I didn't say it was a good idea, rather the opposite. But people do try to flat out murder motorcyclists.
Agree, but does the comparaison of "threatening to kill" and "flat out murder [while driving, right?]" stands? I’m not sure you’re allowed to use you gun to clear out your way because the priority violation was intentional.
If I was putting a sign on my bike, it would be "Put down your phone [you asshat]". Personal insults optional, but definitely deserved. Maybe a graphic of a mangled and cracked phone would do it.
> moves the brake light up to eye level for people in SUVs
Sad that this would be needed. At that price it's insane to me. OP's article is about democratizing safety and keeping it at a low price, while this over engineered brake light is $160 plus tax. Then a 3350 mAh battery and it lasts only 8-12 hours. Crazy
I wonder if that's the one the author refers to when they say, "I purchased one of the few similar products on the market. To my surprise, it relied solely on a basic tilt switch, rattling excessively during rides despite claims of “advanced technology."
I have one of the Brake Free lights and it uses an accelerometer, it's NOT just a basic tilt switch. Nor does it rattle when riding, it's a very solid unit.
I've had friends following me (both in cars and motorcycles) who comment later they can't believe how much more visible it makes me.
It does attach to a helmet and require that you periodically recharge the battery but I'm very happy with the purchase (as opposed to just flashing the brake lights on the bike when slowing)
Does it use an accelerometer to turn on?
Is it safe in case of an accident? The helmet is quite round, and the not round shape may be a problem.
Californian motorcycle commuters are on another level in terms of risk imo. People are lane splitting at like 30mph over the speed of the rest of the traffic and absolutely no one checks for bikers before merging. It is a miracle more people don’t die on the 5 or the 101 every day.
No kidding. The only time I've ever seen motorcycle accidents is on the 10 and 101. Highways in California in general are ridiculous; I'm constantly amazed driving on the 110 that more people don't get killed at the on-ramps with blind curves and everyone going 20 mph over the speed limit.
There are some ridiculously cheap "smart" bicycle brake lights that already react to slowing down
Retroreflective tape on your helmet is also pretty good, and much cheaper.
I saw one of these last week and just assumed it was tied into the brake lights but it was always on.
Oh, now I see that it's just based on an accelerometer. Marketing it as "wireless" seems to suggest that it is monitoring the brake lights rather than "automatically" flashing based on motion.
Tbf, even cars put the brake lights on based purely on deceleration nowadays in addition to triggering when the brake pedal is pressed. It's covered by legislation in both EU and US, since BEVS and PHEVs can have very aggressive regen braking, and the legislation basically says if your rate of deceleration is above X, then lights need to be on even if the brake pedal hasn't been pressed.
Yes and my Kia ev6 needed a software update to do that. I had a couple incidents where people were surprised by my deceleration before the update.
Now in regen the brake lights come on above a certain harvest level.
In addition, some cars - I don't know if this is legislated or a feature - will blink the brake lights or even the alarm lights if it detects a sudden hard brake (emergency brake). But people would do that themselves anyway if they for example had to slow down suddenly due to a traffic jam or whatever.
If you read the article then you will see that the accelerometer is a feature that makes it safer. Apparently, motorcycles can brake even if you don't use the brake, and then you really want the lights to turn on.
'avar' is talking about "engine braking" with a manual transmission car. Most motorbikes have a manual transmission.
If you gear down (you are cruising in fourth gear and 'gear down' to third gear), your vehicle's speed will reduce.
Brake lights are triggered by the brake pedal or lever/pedal on a motorcycle.
In the case of engine braking, the brake lights are not triggered. Drivers behind them can't anticipate stopping without such a signal.
Try it yourself! Some automatic cars, you can gear down, or just pull your parking brake a little. Cars behind you will come dangerously close to hitting you. Also, don't try this.
Wait, do new cars' parking brakes trigger the brake lights? I also wonder about regenerative braking in electric cars where they slow down simply by lifting your foot off the accelerator.
Lifting your foot off the accelerator in a Nissan Leaf triggers brake lights when in e-Pedal mode (one foot driving, no need to use the brake pedal except in an emergency). It reminds me of a feature that car manufacturers declined to install (due to cost) many years ago, in which brake lights would be triggered by rapidly taking your foot off the accelerator. The idea was that this scenario would usually be followed by emergency braking and that anyone following would see the brake lights come on a fraction of a second earlier.
> it's most commonly activated by moving a sort of "stick" situated between the driver and passenger seat
It's not even specific to the ones with the stick. I happen to enjoy and prefer vehicles with three pedals, but I can say from personal experience that a Ford AODE, 4R70W, or 4R100 will hit hard enough to scare passengers when you drop a gear at highway speed.
A Chrysler 45RFE on the other hand will make a lot more noise but basically no braking effort when you downshift.
Weirdly, this happens with every vehicle as soon as I take my foot off the accellerator, except when it's downhill.
(kidding. IIRC EVs do regenerative braking (and trigger the brake lights) when you lift off the accellerator.)
That is a great tip. Thank you! I wonder if they’ll ship to the UK?
Yes, they will:
> Where do you ship to?
> Basically to every European country (-including Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), but in fact we accept and ship orders worldwide. However some markets might not be setup for automated checkout. If you are experiencing difficulty for shipping to a certain country, contact us so that we can manually create a draft order for you to review and complete.
https://www.brakefreetech.eu/pages/support
I've seen several of these on the few riders down here, so I guess yes, one way or another.
Also a helmet cam does wonders for wannabe-tailgaters
Thank you! This is cool. I hadn't seen it before.
Take a look into Lumos bike helmets: https://ridelumos.com/products/remotes-and-mounts
They started via a kickstarter in 2015: https://www.google.com/search?q=lumos+helmet+history
...they kindof "always" had reliability issues w/ detecting braking accurately, I think switching between the handlebar remote/sensor or phone sensors. It's an existing product with a direct analogue to your project goal, and minimally you could trawl for contacts within customer reviews or online reports to get some ideas about the good/bad in this problem space.
Beware of patents (as relevant), but it's a noble and useful project and goal.
I ride a bicycle, and I deliberately mount the rear light directly at the eye level of typical sedans and SUVs. It's not connected to the brakes, but I find that having the light pulse is enough.
Are you on a penny farthing? A tallbike?
I've got the rear flasher on my road bike tucked as high under the seat as it can get, but even with a large frame bike and relaxed commuting (non-aero) posture I'm shorter than the hood lots of full-size SUVs and pickups, much less the seat.
I agree with the other commenter that a 360 cam on top of the helmet has been the most important thing for deterring tailgating and road rage. I've added reflective tape on the frame, the blinking blinking lights under the seat, a headlight on the handlebars and a headlamp with front white and rear red light, and my backpack has a nearly fluorescent neon green cover. Those all help reduce the "Oops, didn't see you there while looking at my phone" close calls, but do nothing to reduce intentional harassment - that's the function of the camera.
Sorry if I was unclear. I have two rear lights. The first one is mounted on the seat post near the eye level of sedans. The second one is mounted at the bottom of the helmet near the eye level of large SUVs.
If you have a hub generator system, they sell rear lights with controllers which detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation and start pulsing when you decelerate.
Why not just connect them to the hand brake levers?
That would be more difficult, expensive, and unreliable. The light is powered by the rotation of the wheel so it already has a reliable braking signal.
How is that difficult, expensive, or unreliable? What could be simpler than a switch that closes when a lever is closed, and turns on a light?
That sounds much simpler, cheaper, and reliable than "detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation".
Also, it works like a car's brake lights, which drivers are accustomed to, rather than "start pulsing when you decelerate", which is when you stop pedaling (unless going downhill).
The light is already by necessity hooked up to the wheel for power and adding a switch and wires to the brakes adds another point of failure making the system less reliable, makes installation more difficult because you have to wire up to the hub generator and the brakes, and more expensive because more components.
That is so cool! Do you know of any brands/models?
Yeah, I have the Busch & Müller Toplight [1]. "The Toplight Line Brake Plus senses when the bike slows under braking and glows brighter. It does this by monitoring the AC frequency from the hub. During braking, the AC frequency slows quickly, and then makes the LEDs pulse or flicker, hopefully getting the attention of that fool in the jacked up SUV behind you."
[1] https://www.rivbike.com/products/dyno-rack-light?srsltid=Afm...
It's very important to consider failure modes when adding something like this.
You should ensure there's no way the new addition could prevent the brake light from working if the electronics were to fail (either electrically, software glitch, corrosion, bad connection, etc). Because failing to light the brake lights upon braking could directly cause an accident.
Secondary perhaps (though still important) is to prevent false positives (brake light illuminating when just driving along normally). That's still bad, but at least other drivers would be suspicious of it and it's more obvious.
I am considering adding a watchdog logic in the microcontroller that holds a mosfet gate, if there is any signs of failure in logic it would pass through the normal light signal.
A lot is also dependent on how it's wired into the vehicle, as in the main electrical failure modes like open circuit, short to ground, stuck at +12V, etc. Need to be careful about where the responsibility (and liability) is.
I have a second concern re: posi-tap as a connection method. Personally, I would not use a insulation displacement connector like that in a high-vibration environment, at least not without many many hours of accelerated lifetime testing under high vibration load. It's possible they're fine, but at the end of the day you're driving a couple of knives partway through a wire in a way that's non-inspectable.
For field installs perhaps the low-temp soldering butt splices would work well? That would be my go-to in your shoes. It does require cutting and stripping wires, which has its own issues if done by the layperson, but it does connect and encapsulate the joint in a way that should be very robust to vibration and to environmental contamination/corrosion.
Genie soldering is not preferred for high vibration environments. Crimping is considered more reliable. Proper strain relief and anti corrosion treatment is key.
It's not preferred for inline connections, but context is important. In a field installation, you can do up a solder-type butt splice with a lighter if you really need to, whereas crimping requires specialized tools.
True enough, but I would take it one farther and say that a properly executed hand splice is arguably preferable to solder if vibration is a factor. Also, even less tools needed, though not everyone carries a little tube of conductive grease with their electrical tape. (But they should, it makes a decent splice immune to corrosion and a solid, “permanent” repair. )
I have had many, many soldered splices fail on generators, marine engines, other long running equipment.
They just break where the copper meets the solder joint. Copper generally has poor fatigue characteristics, depending on the alloy.
I thought electrical wire was generally ~100% Cu.
Some of this also comes down to harness design and how it's put back together after the splice. Ideally, the exposure of the splice itself to flexing is very low. I reckon if it's strain relieved/mechanically fastened well and encapsulated, it doesn't really matter what style of splice you use.
Yes, strain relief is key. Even more so for soldered connections where vibration is significant. But really, no joint is immune to problems without some kind of strain relief to prevent stress concentrations at the rigidity transitions.
I agree that soldering probably won’t produce any issues if the wire is not subjected to significant flexure or vibration, or if it properly strain relieved and secured to a bulkhead so there is no movement at the limit of solder wicking. It’s just that I’m usually too lazy to do that perfectly, so I tend towards more forgiving solutions in vehicles and equipment. But sometimes, solder is the one true way, and I always feel better about soldered joints even if I know I’m statistically wrong.
As for wire being 100 percent copper? I’m not sure, but I have definitely noticed different rigidity of copper fibers. Might be impurities, annealing, or work hardening from the drawing process… but there is definitely variation. Some wire can be really susceptible to fatigue cracking, while others seem relatively immune. Not sure of the why.
Also, don’t even get me started on copper plated aluminum fiber wires.
I think the ideal here would be what good trailer brake adapters do in cars that are not factory equipped with a trailer light connector: they have an adapter for each car model that plugs directly in to the stock wiring harness at the taillight. No soldering, no stripping wires, no piercing insulation. However, this complicates the product because you need an adapter for each bike manufacturer and possibly each bike model or even model year.
Another advantage of this is it simplifies installation for the bike owner. Just mount the controller and connect the plugs.
You have to run the business case (at the end of the day all the work you do has to support this).
What's the NRE/tooling and marginal cost to produce a harness variant, and how many units with that variant will you sell? Will people buy the device without the harness adapter?
OE connectors are hard to get, they're typically not some stock Molex or Deutsch dealy-o. I've worked on projects where we 3D printed whole connector blocks to try to do get mating to OE ECUs. It kinda sucks, and you need a whole lot of volume to support that kind of engineering.
Agree, it has to be practical. The better trailer light adapters do it but probably not for every obscure older car/truck model. And really the whole product idea is something that only applies to older low-end bikes. Newer/higher end bikes increasingly have this feature from the factory.
Consider adding logic to test if the bulb is open. That would be a killer feature for sales.
With BLE integration and an app showing you great deals on bulbs.
And also ads for unrelated products down at the bottom of the page in the app.
ads are amateur hour - gotta make it a subscription and really milk those users.
Also offer a lifetime subscription, then the API disappears after 6 months
it's all LEDs now, i would think, is "open" still a thing?
The author did a great job actually building the project, doing a layout and custom design rather than just stitching together off the shelf modules. Good work.
That being said, in 20 years of riding motorcycles and being an ATGATT (all the gear, all the time) kind of rider, I'm mixed on the need for this. It's something I have thought about doing with a direct hardwire to the throttle, but I can't come up with a situation where I genuinely think it will stop a crash. Maybe if someone is tailgating you, but you should be readily letting them pass rather than relying on their reaction skills anyway. Anything that is sudden and requires a large -dv/dt, you are going to hit your brakes. Engine braking alone is usually used in situations where the road/conditions dictates it, so other drivers are naturally slowing down too.
But I suppose it is also an "it can only help" type product.
EV's with regen braking and manual transmission vehicles are in the same boat: unless they light up when slowing, following drivers will be surprised. The bare standard IMO for all vehicles should not be to light up when brakes are applied but instead any time the vehicle begins decelerating. Adding flashing for a strong stop ~~ >0.75g would be a bonus. Given all the sensors and compute hardware on vehicles -- even bikes -- these days it should just be a software touch.
The Technology Connections YT guy has a whole piece analyzing tail lights and I agree with him.
For what it's worth, I've driven a manual for the past 25 years in the US and I haven't noticed any significant increase in tailgated even when I decelerate. I'm definitely the kind of stick driver who avoids braking and pushes in the clutch and lets the vehicle cruise to a lower speed when possible.
Granted, it's also a red (small) pick-up truck, so pretty visible.
You’d only be surprised if you were absolutely on someones ass. Engine braking is not quite that effective.
In fact this will make traffic worse due to stop n go effect from brakelights triggering more brakelights instead of coasting.
Many automatic transmission cars already turn on their brake lights when losing speed regardless of whether the brakes are pressed or whether not enough throttle is being applied to maintain speed.
I also believe some more recent cars turn on their hazards when brake speeds exceed a certain threshold (I still do that manually).
Regarding EVs: That's already implemented that way. Once EVs start braking more than "expected from roll resistance" the braking lights come on.
I think there were also bugs on some Hyundais where they wouldn't stop or start or whatever, but I think that was sorted. With my Skoda I can see the braking lights go on when I change a higher regeneration step.
> Adding flashing for a strong stop ~~ >0.75g would be a bonus.
Is that a good idea? A flashing brake light could appear as if the brake was let go, which is the exact opposite of the message you would want to send in that case.
Or maybe we are talking about flashing between two different illuminated states?
It’s a common (mandatory?) feature in Europe. Brake lights flash under very hard / emergency brake conditions. The flashing is very rapid, definitely gets your attention, and couldn’t be confused for “letting go” of the brake.
For cars at last I thought it were the warning lights that were going off. Mostly because this is a common way to inform others that there are problems ahead (and a bed to quickly brake)
Quick flashing or high/low would be the way, but quick flashing is very attention getting (with led)
Hard braking on modern cars activate the hazards lights, which are the blinkers.
I guess those situations where you are engine braking and a non-tailgating driver doesn't realize he's closing to an unsafe distance. Then one of a couple of things could cause a collision from this preventably-dangerous situation.
Def not a daily event but not unheard of.
If you drive a manual in a hilly area, or a city with poorly-coordinated traffic lights, it can be an extremely frequent event.
Not that trying to shed tailgaters or trigger-happy brake lights are foolproof. A couple decades ago, my car was totaled by a rear-end collision. I was stopped and stuck in the traffic at a red light. The at-fault driver popped over a little hill with her nose stuck in a map - failing to notice me, the other vehicles, or the red light, in time.
I drove a manual with a 4.6l v8 as my daily driver for 8-10 years.
After taking a motorcycle safety course (in which they teach applying the brake to trigger the lights when engine braking to alert cars behind you )
I did some anecdotal testing / started triggering the brake lights when engine braking in the car. While not effective for everyone behind me, triggering the brake lights did seem to increase the distance people began to slow at, and also their following distance increased.
I was once rear ended, while I was completely stopped, with a train going by in front of me. Since it was a flat level surface I had let me foot off the brake.
I do wonder if I had still had the brake applied if the person would have noticed. (However, this is a poor example as the driver who rear ended me was an unlicensed 16 year old driving illegally ).
While on my motorcycle, I try to always trigger my brake lights. I will trigger them rapidly in scenarios where I have sufficient stopping distance but I would be doing a more aggressive stop in a car as the flashing does seem to get more attention.
Tbh I find my manual gearbox car not able to slow very hard at all with engine braking. However it's admittedly not a Diesel engine.
Having driven (and engine braked) both diesel and gas manuals - yes, a diesel is much better at slowing "very hard". Beware of doing that if someone is close or inattentive behind you.
With either one, any need-to-brake situation gets more complex - you need to decide "brake pedal, engine, or both?". But I'm not driving manuals because I want driving to be super-simple.
Interesting. I found my diesel Mercedes to not have much engine braking at all (which I attributed to the lack of a throttle plate or any throttling of airflow) as compared to similar size and weight gas cars (which have a throttle plate in the intake).
Supposedly, the engine controls in my VW diesel (90HP 4-cylinder "TDI" engine) cut off all fuel when the driver was engine breaking (no throttle, RPM's above current desired idle speed). Perhaps they made other adjustments. It could brake pretty hard that way.
I'd guess the engine controls in your Mercedes handled that situation rather differently, for "Mercedes customers will expect..." reasons.
I like a brake you can choose to tap without engaging proper brakes just to flash your lights backwards, instead of worrying about more smarts in the vehicle that can stop working or whatever.
In best cases this brake gives a bit of feedback when it engages the light but not yet engage the actual brake.
You are free to use this technique to signal "back off" whenever you're engine braking or before you brake or even when you're not even braking but don't like the tailgater
I’ve found this to be true of most cars- where you can very lightly touch the brake where the light will turn on before the actual brakes engage / engage in a noticeable way. It’s a great tool.
Especially important when engine braking down large hills, as I notice people don’t always seem to realize how rapidly they are approaching you if they don’t receive a braking signal.
I agree with you - situational awareness is what keeps us safe, and not engaging with poor drivers but rather creating distance.
for braking, I use engine braking at stop lights, and can easily slow down almost all of the way without any brakes applied. Motorcyclists should definitely be taught to drag the rear brake when engine braking to let others know. Most people are unaware of how quickly a bike can slow down, or rather, how so little mass reacts much differently to situations (ex. even going downhill, unless in 5th/6th gear, bikes generally don't pick up speed coasting but rather slow down).
You're making an assumption that someone tailgating you wants to pass. That isn't really true. A decent percentage of drivers just want to tailgate someone.
Well then they can tailgate someone else.
> BMW’s dynamic brake light, for example, flashes during emergency braking to alert trailing drivers, greatly enhancing road safety.
Mind you, that this is not enabled in all countries. In the USA the rear fog lights turn on in addition to the brake lights under heavy braking, as flashing the lights weren't allowed.
They remain on until you no longer depress the brakes.
Unsure if they're allowed right now, or whether the ones you see are aftermarket mods.
For BMW you can change the coding (configuration) relatively easy.
There is also a difference in 3 flashes when you touch the brakes, constant flashing while pressing the brakes, or only flashing under having braking.
I can't imagine driving in stop&go traffic where all brake lights are constantly flashing.
only flashes on heavy braking, normal use is not affected
I dont understand why exactly this isnt mandatory for past 2 decades in regulated markets like EU.
Over easter I had the displeasure of driving cca 1500km road with family and we experienced quite a few 130kmh -> full stop without warning situations that one barely manages even when breaking full and heavily relies on all others doing the same. In one of the situations a car right in front of us didnt manage and hit already-crashed cars in front of it in billiard style, plastics and glass flying everywhere, luckily nobody was injured but cars were in pieces.
Second case next day - again full stop out of blue, ahead, we & after us managed within 3-4m of each other, but cars after that didnt, again billiard that travelled all the way up to us (we ended up with few scratches on back spoiler, I moved our car a bit ahead when I heard big bangs behind, avoiding bigger damage to us).
One only has a split second to realize how quickly that car ahead is closing in in such scenarios if you dont have other info. Could save hundreds of lives each year easily and easy to implement.
US mandated automatic emergency braking starting in 2029.
my US mazda cx5 center brake light flashes when you press the brakes.
> my US mazda cx5 center brake light flashes when you press the brakes.
That is not a factory feature, it's almost certainly a dealer-installed piece of junk like this (https://pulseprotects.com/product-info/) which the dealer almost certainly charged a stupid amount of money for, and as noted it's not actually legal in the US.
Around me the local Hyundai/Kia chain loves to install those, and I hate them.
As you may be aware, the US is a confederation of states. The type of light that flashes several times at the initiation of braking is specifically authorized by the California Vehicle Code, and perhaps in other states.
Do you have a reference as to where it's allowed in the CVC? FMVSS section 108 table I-c specifies this for the stop light:
Steady burning. Must be activated upon application of the service brakes. When optically combined with a turn signal lamp, the circuit must be such that the stop signal cannot be activated if the turn signal lamp is flashing. May also be activated by a device designed to retard the motion of the vehicle.
California Code, Vehicle Code - VEH § 25251.5
(a) Any motor vehicle may also be equipped with a system in which an amber light is center mounted on the rear of a vehicle to communicate a component of deceleration of the vehicle, and which light pulses in a controlled fashion at a rate which varies exponentially with a component of deceleration.
(b) Any motor vehicle may be equipped with two amber lamps on the rear of the vehicle which operate simultaneously with not more than four flashes within four seconds after the accelerator pedal is in the deceleration position and which are not lighted at any other time. The lamps shall be mounted at the same height, with one lamp located on each side of the vertical centerline of the vehicle, not higher than the bottom of the rear window, or if the vehicle has no rear window, not higher than 60 inches. The light output from each of the lamps shall not exceed 200 candlepower at any angle horizontal or above. The amber lamps may be used either separately or in combination with another lamp.
(c) Any stoplamp or supplemental stoplamp required or permitted by Section 24603 may be equipped so as to flash not more than four times within the first four seconds after actuation by application of the brakes.
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251-5/
Thanks, TIL!
I bought the car used. I did not install it, but can not claim the previous owner did or did not.
Doesn't seem to be illegal enough if dealers are installing them
I've got a NHTSA letter bookmarked [1] that says
> According to a document by SafeLite of America, Inc., that you enclosed, its product Safe-T-Stop "will pulse [the center high mounted brake light] for approximately 6 seconds and reactivate if the brakes are reapplied." You read S5.5.10(d) of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 108 as requiring "that the third brake light must be wired to be steady-burning," and that you believe that Safe-T-Stop "contravenes this requirement of the standard by varying the brightness of the light."
> We confirm your interpretation. S5.5.10(a), (b), and (c) list the motor vehicle lamps that may flash when they are operated. No stop lamp is among the lamps listed. S5.5.10(d) requires all other lamps to be wired to be steady burning, thus including all stop lamps. Standard No. 108 does not allow a stop lamp that pulses, and a vehicle with a stop lamp that pulses does not meet Federal requirements.
It's clear that there's not much enforcement, since all the dealers I've visited near me install these things by default. If you commit to a car that's not yet delivered, you can negotiate to exclude these, or you can have them remove it (but they'll most likely have cut into the factory harness to install it, so the wiring harness has been modified, which is a negative IMHO).
Personally, I find these devices to be pretty terrible. I would be fine with flashing for high intensity braking, but the flashing is attention grabbing by design, and it's inappropriate in a lot of situations as it distracts from gathering awareness of the surroundings.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/20288ztv
No one cares, not all states have mandatory inspections, and many inspectors just check if the brake light comes on when they press the brake pedal which would not reveal such an aftermarket device.
The only way to catch something like this would be a road driving test by the inspector, and even here in Europe this is not required.
IIRC in the USA there are features allowed to be installed aftermarket that aren't legal to be installed as a dealer option (like front side-window tinting)
I wondered once if it would be possible to ride a motorcycle safely if I drove carefully (everyone I know who rides has been in at least one serious accident).
I thought: I could look at the data, but I see so many motorcyclists driving dangerously that the data wouldn't teach me much.
So then I thought: I bet if I look at the accident rate for women riders it would be interesting.
I found that in the UK, male riders have seven times the accident rate of female riders.
So I guess how you ride does make a huge difference.
Age is another differentiator. Take young men out of the equation and you get a much better picture.
Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.
So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.
Some guy out for a cruise laying his bike down after things got a little more spicy than her was prepared for mid corner is a fundamentally different kind of accident than someone T-boning a left turning car and going over the handlebars in commuting traffic.
Texting and driving probably accounts for a lot of minor bumps in stop and go traffic that cause inconsequential damage and obviously no injury and isn't really relevant to someone who texts and drives into stopped traffic at highway speeds.
Treating those sorts of accidents that are categorically different in both cause and effect one homogenous statistical blob really rubs me the wrong way.
This sadly does not say anything because the kilometers driven is unknown in this statistic, right? So it could be that female drivers do not drive that many kilometers compared to males, which results in less accidents.
Also, is this accidents total men / women? Then it would not even take into account, that there are significant more male riders.
GP didn't specify, but IIRC vehicle incident rates are usually specified in terms of distance driven/ridden, so the stats they were looking at may have already taken that into account.
In my experience the number of female riders is so small, that from a statistical point of view it becomes almost irrelevant.
Women also tend to ride smaller bikes, for obvious reasons.
It was deaths/km ridden.
This would be better. Still does not take into account bigger and smaller bikes. I find it extremely difficult to judge that. From my experience, you are absolutely right. Men seem to take higher risk and some of them the consequences.
That’s the worst stat. By trip would be much better.
Motorcyclists on average ride less than 3,000 miles a year, cars are 4-6x that. 90% of accidents are within 10 miles of the riders home.
There are so many ways to die on a motorcycle that are outside of your control. Someone could not be paying attention, make a mistake, not see you, be drunk, etc.
I knew someone at a previous company that was here one day then gone the next due to a non-highway accident caused by someone else IIRC.
It's sort of like being friends with someone who plays low-chance russian roulette for fun in their free time.
This might sound overly fatalistic but... everyone is playing low-chance Russian roulette all the time. I know multiple people who've died of random health issues far sooner than they should have, tomorrow isn't promised for anybody. May as well do one of the most fun activities ever invented by humans in the meantime
It simply comes down to riding like everyone's out to get you. Another comment summed it up nicely by saying you essentially have to position yourself assuming no one has explicitly seen you.
I've done a decent amount of miles like that and I've barely had any close calls.
Brake lights should be activated whenever the vehicle is significantly slowing down regardless of whether the brakes are being used or not. And this should be standard across _all_ vehicles, not just motorcycles. I would say brakes should also override any automated method too, just in case of malfunction.
This is just (I am not trying to trivialise the incredible amount of effort required to take a hardware project, even a simple one, to market) an LIS3DH wired to some brake lights. Every single road-vehicle could easily have this technology.
I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).
There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.
I don’t understand the voices against it: even if it’s recuperating, the car _is_ decelerating, which is why it triggers (and it should). What’s the problem according to them?
The threshold can be a problem- you don't want the threshold to be too low, or else the brake lights come on when even slight deceleration is occurring. This would give an annoyingly too-common signal that would possibly be disregarded/ not be an effective form of visual communication.
Ok, the threshold should be correctly set, but recuperation doesn’t change the threshold, it just makes it very visible when the threshold is too low…
As I understood it, it's less of a real problem and more of a perceived annoyance. People accelerate, let go of the pedal, realize that a deceleration sets in, accelerate again, etc. so their brake lights are flashing all the time (instead of just using their cruise control to have this happen much more smoothly and ideally below the relevant thresholds).
I live in a mountainous area that attracts huge amount of motorcyclists on weekends. Most of the fatal accidents I recall in the last years (usually around a dozen per year) were caused by right of way violations by cars, by excessive speeding of the cyclists, or by risky overtakes. I am not sure how a brake light would help there.
Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
To respond to your second part: I don't need to cope. Motorcycles are sold to meet noise pollution standards just like cars.
Something about this generalization rubs me the wrong way. A person who modifies their motorcycle to be extremely loud does not care.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/noise-camera-tech...
The UK is trialling noise pollution cameras that mail fines to your home, same as for speeding. It's an externality whose days are numbered.
Sickening use of tech. Living in a true surveillance state
Easy to say when you don't live next to a road frequented by drivers with ridiculous modified exhausts.
MOTs already have a decibel limit. I don't understand how these vehicles can be road worthy considering how loud they are.
This technology feels like an engineers solution to a trivial legal issue.
Isn't the issue that some people work around MOT decibel limits? After all they only need to pass the decibel limit on the MOT test, and not on the road in regular use.
The engineering solution approach doesn't seem to be fundamentally different to speed cameras.
I used to live in downtown Chicago, where the worst violators where high end sports cars, though we did get the occasional quartet of motorcycles ripping down the roat at 3am.
Illinois doesn't require vehicle inspections, so there's no opportunity for exhaust modifications to be discovered.
Motorcycle exhausts are easy to swap out so people could easily take the MOT with the stock exhaust then swap the loud exhaust into place when they get home.
What would be a better solution in your view?
>Sickening use of tech. Living in a true surveillance state
people with loud exhausts are shouting "look at me, look at me", so think of it like a clickwrap license agreeing to be surveilled
Satire?
Id like to see this kind of brake light as the default for any vehicle, not just motorbikes.
As for the noise, I get it. And I think the industry and the riders are to blame, motorbikes have been getting outrageously loud. Especially the fact that some newer bikes even come with exhaust valves that open at like 55-60 km/h is insane to me.
While I enjoy the hobby I cometely understand why Südtirol did what it did and I won't be surprised to see strict limits like these pop up elsewhere too.
When I was a child, our suburban home was at the mouth of a dead-end but very straight street. It was 100% residential, 25mph, single lane each way, but many motorists abused it. We could often tell when someone was lost, looking for the freeway, looking for a through lane that would put them somewhere else.
When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)
Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.
And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.
My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.
> how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
If you don't modify the exhaust of a motorcycle, it's noise levels are not different than a car, and substantially quieter than a semi truck.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
Could say the same for cars, which contribute to more noise pollution.
Yep. It’s weird to call out motorcycles when typically any good mountain roads frequented by motorcyclists are more commonly used by cars. Especially at night when any noise would be most disturbing. Motorcyclists don’t typically ride very fast on dark mountain roads at night (headlights on motorcycles barely illuminate anything) but auto enthusiasts certainly will.
I’ve had both “loud” bikes and cars (all legal - stock, in fact). The cars easily have 10x the mileage.
The one thing I’d say is - you can’t really control sound of the external world. Cities are infinitely louder. I live in nyc right now and live off a major avenue near the Lincoln tunnel. Whatever annoyances people here have with loud bikes, trust me - my noise is 1000x worse on a daily level. Yet, I’m not perturbed by it unless I open the window cause I chose a place that used quality windows and insulation.
They simply don't care for the second part. Some even consider it a safety feature (to be known well in advance) and modify exhausts to be louder accordingly.
The amount of time me or our kids were woken up by some ferrari, maserati, chopper et al flooring it on purpose on nearby intersection past midnight has been many, punishment 0 nothing. After moving to rural countryside its one of many aspects I am certainly not missing from previous life and would have hard time coming back to lower quality of life in cities.
If you don’t mind me asking, what area of the world did you move from and to? What was the experience like, in general?
Moving from cramped suburbia to a few acres in the mountains/countryside is a dream of mine these days
Thank you all for your questions and support, since this is blowing up a bit, I have a discount 'HN30' 30% off, if anyone is interested
I've been a motorcyclist for over 30 years.
I pretty much live by this:
“If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.” ― Neal Stephenson, Zodiac
I have ridden motorcycles for 20 years and could not agree more. Defensive riding, assume distraction and reckless drivers, perhaps even willingness to bump into you “accidentally on purpose”. I have actually experienced the latter.
TBH, I'm surprised this isn't already common. It is very similar to what EVs do, due to the relatively high regenerative braking.
You'd only see it on newer bikes with ABS, they seem likely to have more sensors and "electronics" in the brake system. In that kind of system the deceleration could be inferred from existing speed signals. I wouldn't be surprised if ABS systems already estimate the engine braking torque directly.
What is the general consensus on ABS braking in motorcycles? Really curious to hear from anyone who has rode a bike equipped with it.
For some reason the idea of a bike interfering with brake controls seems like it could feel unsafe if the system isn't designed really well. Extremely low margin for error when it comes to braking on a 2 wheel vehicle especially in suboptimal conditions.
I could see ABS braking being fine for the back tire, but the idea of automatic braking on the front tire would scare me.
Front brake is where it's most beneficial as the front wheel is what keeps the bike upright. If you lock the front wheel, especially in a turn, the bike falls over almost instantly.
edit: Rear wheel locking gives a bit more time to react.
Personally the main safety benefit is for emergency braking in wet conditions. ABS also allows to use full brakes in the wet without worrying so much about falling over. That's the real benefit, real-world it shortens your stopping distance because of that increased confidence in using the brake.
> ABS also allows to use full brakes in the wet without worrying so much about falling over. That's the real benefit, real-world it shortens your stopping distance because of that increased confidence in using the brake.
I think this point is worth emphasizing. You'll hear from a lot of folks on motorcycle forums that ABS will increase stopping distance. Which is true for great drivers performing threshold braking. How many motorcycle riders actually practice front braking on their non ABS bike until they lock up the front wheel to really learn the limits of themselves and their bike? For most people, you'll be able to use more brakes and stop in a shorter distance in more conditions with ABS while maintaining control of the vehicle.
I'd consider myself a pretty good rider but I've caught myself once or twice jamming on the brakes when a chaotic accident unfolds in front of me and the lizard brain takes over. I live in LA so lots of traffic and lots of accidents are common and any technology that helps my lizard brain keep me alive in a positive in my book.
I recently crashed cornering during a light mist and now I'm on the looking for anything that helps lean slippage. I know you can't fix stupid but still hoping something is out there. My old and busted vstrom needs an upgrade.
Yes, as I understand it ABS catches the occasion where your braking overwhelms the wheel-road friction the wheel locks and starts to skid. If you're before that threshold then it doesn't activate and doesn't negatively affect anything, if you do lock then ABS activating is better than not having it and the remedy is the same as without ABS where you release the brake enough for the wheel to turn again. A skid is the least desirable in terms of control and stopping distance, having ABS lets a driver hit the brakes hard in an emergency with more confidence.
There's a great FortNine video showing the pros and cons. The very short of it is that the perfect rider can stop faster without ABS but ABS + good technique can achieve very similar results while drastically reducing the consequences of panic braking.
This isn't mentioned in the video, but ABS also enables more aggressive use of linked brake systems, which also improve worst-case safety when a rider panics and uses only one brake or the wrong brake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDbWZiaUeDY
There's no such thing as "consensus" in any hobby, but the general trends are:
1. ABS on motorbikes has been proven to prevent lock-ups and therefore accidents, especially among newer riders who are more likely to grab all the brakes in situations where modulation of brake application is required to prevent an accident.
2. Traditionalists say that ABS keeps new riders from having to learn to correctly modulate the brakes and thus keeps them reliant on ABS forever, and that experienced riders can stop quicker without ABS. (The last point is technically true but it requires a highly-skilled rider and a certain set of conditions.)
ABS is bikes IS typically designed very well. (Although I have to take the Internet's word for it since my bike is a 1979 GS850G.)
Most, if not all, modern motorcycles already come with ABS braking. For many motorcycles it's also adjustable, for example switching off ABS in the rear while retaining it in the front, for those riding offroad and dirt.
Many bikes also come with cornering ABS, meaning that if the motorcycle is at an angle, the ABS comes in gradually.
Overall ABS is pretty much a "solved" problem right now, on motorcycles 2012+ at the very least. Earlier ABS wasn't that great. I had a BMW F800GS in 2010 and the ABS was horrible on bumpy roads. You basically had no braking if it kicked in.
If you're in Australia where it is mandated, sure. In most of the world, no motorcycles have ABS
It is mandatory in many countries, not just Australia. Europe, Japan, Brazil, etc, all require ABS on new motorcyles.
"Europe" is not and never has been a country to my knowledge.
Would you prefer to read a full list of EU member countries instead? As well as Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, ABS is also required in the UK.
...but it has mostly harmonized road rules, eg in relation to the ABS on the bigger bikes.
I'm in South Africa, and most of the popular brands have ABS by default, including top sellers like BMW R1300GS, Honda Africa Twin, KTM 890. This is big adventure country, like Australia. I think the superbikes also have ABS now since about 10 years ago.
In Europe new motorcycles must have ABS on both wheels since 2017.
Its a good thing.
While it is possible to stop in less distance without ABS, in real live emergency situations ABS usually is of great help due to the no skill required, additional control.
For example if you take the sudden car running in front of you from a side road. You will instinctively pull the brakes hard on a road with unknown slipperiness.
Maybe the car then stops in the last second or is really fast so there is space, then you need control to ride around the car.
You really don't want your rear wheel locking up and the bike going sideways or doing a stoppie on your front wheel which completely removes any way of obstacle avoidance.
The same is true if over breaking in a curve, if you can handle the bike standing up you can brake astonishingly hard in curves.
I would not recommend it though it feels really weird being slippery in a curve.
On rainy days i do even like traction control. It saved my ass a few times where i accelerated out of a curve a bit to enthusiastically on wet foliage.
ABS on a motorcycle is pretty great on the roadways. The issue I've heard from people is that it can't be disabled off road on many motorcycles. Most owners just unplugged the sensors entirely as a result, causing the system to indicate failure.
>I could see ABS braking being fine for the back tire, but the idea of automatic braking on the front tire would scare me.
Just to be clear, Anti-Lock Braking (ABS) is different than Automated Emergency Braking (AEB).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_emergency_braking_sy...
Don't know about general consensus, but I'm a big fan. I've had an emergency stop (deer ran out into the road) on a bike not equipped with it, and turns out that in an emergency I will just jam on the brakes and lock the wheels. Luckily I was going straight, and the bike stayed upright.
I'm very happy with my ABS (2023 F850 GS), especially since its "aggressiveness" depends on the riding mode.
Obviously it's tilt- and acceleration-aware, so I'm confide it's safe.
It works very well.
It’s not automatic braking. It’s automatically letting off the brakes for a fraction of a second to prevent locking up, aka anti-lock braking system
If it does kick in you get a slight pulsing on the leaver which means unless you are emergency braking, back off.
As far as the front goes, you never want the front to lock as you are almost certainly going down.
For off-road abs modes normally they turn rear off completely so you can deliberately lock it and decrease the sensitivity on the front but still keep the abs on for the front.
Im surprised new cars dont just go off of a gyro decel reading, don't modern cars already have a gyro?
An accelerometer would be a far better sensor than a gyro here. (You want to measure linear acceleration not angular velocity.)
I unsuccessfully built something like this for my bicycle a while back: https://niels-ole.com/bike/maker/2020/02/20/bicycle-light
> It turned out that when I accelerate strongly, I pull the bike back, at some point in the rotation of the pedals. This is rightfully detected as a sudden deceleration of the bicycle.
I guess on a much heavier motorcycle the deceleration of the motorcycle is actually a meaningful indicator of the combination driver+motorcycle slowing down.
Busch und Müller has some products with brake lights
https://www.bumm.de/en/products/dynamo-rucklichter/produkt/3...?
https://www.bumm.de/en/products/e-bike-r%C3%BCcklichter/pare...?
If only somebody would make motorcycles less noisy.. I dream of the day where there are neither mosquitos nor motorcycle noise. Two most annoying things during the summer.
Factory motorcycles aren't that loud. Most of the ones you notice are modified.
There's an annoyingly persistent group of motorcycle enthusiasts that enjoys making as much noise as possible. They actively dislike electric motorcycles because they're not obnoxiously loud.
Then there are also the people that think they need to be loud to be noticed. That has been debunked, but that doesn't stop people from feeling a false sense of safety and sabotaging their vehicle's sound deadening regardless.
There are plenty of rules regarding the noise these things are allowed to make, but until law enforcement actually enforces those laws, nothing will change. That's with the unreasonably high legal noise limit.
I live next to a main road in London. As technology progresses, cars have gotten quieter, but for some reason motorcycles feel like they're becoming louder.
When I go read a book in the park, it's all very nice and quiet until a motorcycle arrives
When I want to sleep with the window open, if I hear any noise it's due to these motorbikes doing races at night.
If I was dictator for a year and didn't have policing resources to enforce noise control, I would just ban non-electric motorbikes
Sadly noise sells.
I can totally understand that bikers like to hear the engine and exhaust of their bike but physics and the design of motorcycles is not very accommodating to that.
My bike has the manufacturers default 94db idle exhaust.
It is 94db because anything louder than that is not allowed on certain nice Austrian roads, so the manufacturer set it to 94.
While driving i hear the wind noise on the helmet, the airbox, the drive train and a bit of the engine. I usually wear ear protection.
To be clear 94db is a lot and it is way more if you pull on the gas and i don't have one of those stupid valve controlled exhausts.
I am always astonished how freaking loud that thing is, when i hear it's exhaust echoing over open fields or while going through a tunnel at full tilt.
It just comes down to physics, the exhaust points not at the biker, so the noise is directed into the environment.
There is no engine bay covering the engine and gearbox so that is comparatively loud, also chaindrives are rather noisy as well.
For the exhaust to compete it must be incredibly loud, which of course is obnoxious.
Some modern (sports) cars play engine sounds via the stereo system, maybe someone can build something similar for bikers.
Current electric motorcycles can already be pretty silent, to the detriment of pedestrians. Some have added artificial noises because of this, like ones already used in cars.
Unfortunately for bystanders, but fortunately for drivers, noise is one of the strongest way for motorcycles to signal themselves to cars.
Cars can't hear motorcycles until it's too late: https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a35952569/loud-p...
I believe these would be illegal in Ontario.
The section 62 of the Highway Traffic Act says this:
> Intermittent red light restricted
> (14) Subject to subsections (14.1), (15) and (17.1), no person shall use a lamp, other than turning signal lamps or the vehicular hazard warning signal lamps commonly known as four way flashers, that produces intermittent flashes of red light.
There is an exemption for bicycles but not motorcycles.
Your site really needs a video :) I've run Hyperlites on my bikes forever (https://hyperlites.com/). I like them as they don't interfere with the original brake light, and provide additional lights higher up on the bike.
My motorcycle pet peeve is that if you ride bicycles routinely the control differences between bikes and motorcycles become potentially dangerous, especially while riding the motorcycle. I'm not sure how to align their controls more, but if your bike has a rotary handle shifter and one day on the motorcycle you "shift" with the throttle, it's not going to go well. There are a number of other possible control goofs you can do that aren't great.
I ride both regularly and I don't really have a problem switching between them. For me, the overall experience is so entirely different between the two, that my brain knows to treat them differently. Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.
(Blipping the throttle accidentally should never cause an emergency unless other things are already going wrong: for example, if you are riding a bike whose power is way beyond your skill level or you are following someone too closely.)
> Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.
My riding mower is tank-steer (zero turn)... pretty hard to use those skills on a car. But steering wheels basically work the same on all the equipment I've got with those; some easier to turn than others depending on geometry and power assist. The pedals are more likely to be different --- the mower has a friction lever on a panel to set the throttle / engine speed and levers you hold to go forward and back on right and left (so this does steering too); the tractor has similar throttle level, and then a pedal that you rotate to go forward or back with both wheels (all wheels if you put it into 4x4) and it has a splitable brake pedal if you want to brake on one side or the other.
But yeah; none of that makes it hard to go back and drive a car. Other than sometimes it'd be nice to do some tight turns at the expense of my tires if I could control each side individually.
I regularly swap between a scooter and motorcycle, owning both.
The big difference being left hand leaver on a motorcycle is the clutch, rear brake is right foot, on a scooter, no clutch so the left hand leaver is the rear break.
When I first got the scooter I was expecting the obvious accidental muscle memory confusion with the left leaver when swapping vehicles. For some reason it just never happened, never accidentally gone for the clutch on the scooter and never accidentally gone for the rear brake on the bike.
Another problem is that on most bycicles right leaver is the REAR brake, while on motoryclces it FRONT. It make difference when braking in turns. I was actually considering swapping my bike brakes left to right but it turns out one of the cables is too short. :(
US bicycles, that is. In the UK the bicycle brakes are the other way around.
It's a matter of preference - I'm in the UK and I have my brakes the Euro way, front on the left. With most brakes swapping around is trivial.
The UK and Us drive on different sides of the roads and are taught to user different arms for signals as a result. If I'm going to turn I need to both slow down by using the brakes and signal to others. thus I want the rear brakes (even thought front can stop faster I don't want to risk losing traction on that wheel in traffic)
1991, first time riding a motorcycle... After a 15 minutes instruction course near the barn from which we extracted the 200 cm³ bike, off we were in Idaho's mountains. As a 15 years-old French person, the whole experience was exhilarating and it wasn't long before I started to relax and open the throttle a bit on the dirt track...
As an avid mountain bike cyclist back in France, I hung to what seemed familiar - which worked well enough until the first sharp bend came... It came way too fast, I panicked, cycling reflexes took over, I shifted my weight back and pressed both handle levers hard - getting the (to a cyclist) very unexpected result of both disengaging the clutch and thus losing all engine braking while locking the front wheel hard (why did they put the front break where the rear, which helps me control slides, is supposed to be ?)... I was catapulted, followed by the bike... Nothing broken - just bruises, rashes and the flattened ego of a lucky idiot.
As a daily cyclist, being a motorcycle passenger on big engines always terrifies me: I'm on two wheels, with bicycle-like positions and trajectories... But everything happens monstrously too fast, my instincts for braking and acceleration are all out of calibration, so I always feel that we cannot possibly survive the next turn !
So, yes - I recommend not mixing bicycling and motorcycling.
I standardize all my two wheeled vehicles to the motorcycle layout for this reason. It bothers my push bike friends to an amusing degree but it's much safer for me. Plus I feel I have greater control of the critical front brake with my most dextrous and strong hand.
I regularly ride both bikes and motorbikes and this never has been a problem, even though the lever that is the rear brake on the bike is the front brake on the motorcycle.
> even though the lever that is the rear brake on the bike is the front brake on the motorcycle
Then your bicycles brakes have been put back on the wrong sides (is home maintenance by a previous owner to blame?).
The front brake should _always_ be on the right. Just like a motorbike.
EDIT: Correction. It appears US and UK bicycles have their brakes on opposite sides. How bizarre!
In the UK, British standard cycle brakes also have the front brake on the right. I think bike brakes being swapped is only a continental Europe thing.
Maybe it coincides with the road driving side - apparently Australia, NZ and Japan also have front brake right, while the US does not.
No. In continental Europe, the front brake is always on the left. Might be different in the UK and US.
Engine braking with an internal combustion engine generates a vacuum in the intake manifold, because the throttle is closed while the pistons suck air.
(Performance cars sometimes have vacuum gauges to measure this. Aftermarket ones can be installed.)
A brake light could be rigged to activate past a certain a vacuum threshold. (There would be some false positives that are possibly not worth caring about.)
For all the engineering described in the article, I'm surprised it doesn't mention this possibility, if only to give reasons why it was discarded. (Maybe it's a bad solution; I have no ide!)
It seems that a vacuum-driven brake light could possibly have an advantage of kicking in faster than a motion detector, because it could trigger as soon as the revs are dropping with the throttle closed, before the clutch engages to actually connect the engine braking to the wheel.
I.e. blip-throttle before downshift -> vacuum kicking in / light comes on -> downshift completes, actual braking begins.
It's an interesting idea.
When talking about triggering over a certain threshold before the clutch is engaged, I'm guessing you mean detecting the hand throttle being let go particularly quickly after a downshift blip? I don't have any real evidence for this, but based on how I think I use the throttle when riding, I feel like this would have a very high false positive rate unless you're deliberately using the throttle very gently in normal riding; or a high false negative rate if you tune it so it only activates on really aggressive throttle blips. It would probably be more reliable to just trigger off high vacuum once the clutch has engaged.
Also, I'm not 100% sure but I don't think my bike has any vacuum tubing you could tap into - it doesn't have a vacuum brake servo like a car. So you'd have to drill into the intake manifold to mount a sensor.
Shame on the author. I clicked the "cats" link in the header only to find out it's short for categories. Boo.
I rode a Honda 350 for seven years starting with the Oil Crisis, before bike headlights even turned on automatically, although I kept mine lit. The biggest problem was other drivers not noticing me coming on or from the side, because compared to cars bikes were and still are rare on the road. They'd turn as I was passing their blind spot, or pull out in front of me from a cross street, etc. Seemed like I'd have a close call about once per week, but I don't recall ever having a threat of being hit from behind.
This was a great read — love how it blends real-world frustration with a builder’s mindset.
The insight about how little attention goes into motorcycle specific safety tech is spot on. The market tends to over-index on cars, but the stakes for motorcyclists are arguably higher per mile. Would love to see more open source or modular frameworks emerge in this space something others could build on top of, regionally or by use-case.
Curious if you explored anything around passive detection (weather, terrain, phone telemetry) or if most of your work focused on rider input and behavior?
This is something I want for all of my street bikes. I roll off the throttle a fair bit before grabbing the brakes on my Ruckus and way earlier on my modified Metropolitan. Always watching the mirrors while doing so. And my 1966 Sears ( made by Gilera ) only has a brake light switch on the rear brake pedal. I'm so conditioned to use the front brakes on a motorcycle that I often forget to tap the rear brake to signal other drivers. I'll be ordering 3 myself if they ship to the US, or getting my buddy in the UK to snag them for me.
Ooooh what a title
In 2019 I was a bicycling a lot, and really wanted to get something with a motor, so I could be a bit faster/farther/not so sweaty with my trips. I had access to a car but rarely used it.
I really don't like many inherent safety issues with motorcycles and never seriously considered obtaining one, but kept wanting a two-wheeled vehicle with a motor.
I'd ridden a 50cc scooter in 2019 for a few days, and it was fine then, but I never considered one seriously since.
Eventually, in 2020 it was an emergency room doctor who suggested I look at 'real scooters' instead of the 50cc things.
So I did, eventually I ended up owning a 170cc scooter/moped thing, and it feels infinitely safer than a motorcycle, and a bicycle. I've done 20,000 miles on scooters since then, probably, all over the world,
including Denver to Canada and back once.
Cheaper lighter more efficient, than motorcycles. more stable, lower center of mass, better wind protection, useful storage options, too, compared to motorcycles and bicycles.
I ride mine year round, no issues.
I wrote a page trying to capture some of the upsides, but it's hard to get the tone right on the internet:
https://josh.works/scootering
> Scooters are vastly safer than motorcycles
Why make such a definitive claim with zero evidence to back it up?
The justifications in that section are nonsense and seem to boil down to a skill issue on your part.
Sure, around the city a scooter makes sense for a lot of people, though I believe they provide a false sense of security. The lower barrier to entry also lowers the "perceived" risk.
Feeling safer !== safer
Personally, I feel much safer on one of my motorcycles than a scooter. But that's because I am extremely comfortable on a motorcycle and can make it do exactly what I want, when I want.
Scooters are great in the city, but they are kinda boring when it comes to touring or hitting the twisties. My dad's 200cc Vespa is just about interesting enough to ride on hills, but anything below that is just yawn.
Any marginal safety benefit you're getting from riding a scooter is being completely erased by the disregard for basic road safety principles shown in the footage.
Good example how to push forward and do the thing.
Otherwise, is it me or the info on the product page is a bit dry. No size specs, no instructions, not enough pics. It is like the last step to convert is not fully complete yet.
One of the issues usually is to make sure the part is compatible with the bike as otherwise you need to spend money to get it and then “try it”. The suggestion with tge pictures how to put it would be useful as well.
I like this! Have thought of it for both bikes and cars, I drive manual and occasionally just downchange coming up to lights or off motorways. Also used to have a zx636 and bought an LED brake light that flashed obnoxiously when triggered (F1 style), I like to think the safety it added offset how annoyed I was probably making everyone behind me.
> “Moreover, during intense braking scenarios, it flashes proportionately to the braking intensity.”
In Europe, a lot of modern cars have a similar feature. When braking particular hard (eg: a sudden emergency stop from highway speeds) the brake lights will flash rapidly to warn drivers behind you. It’s a very good safety feature, IMO. But not legal in North America?
I agree, but the device has built in switch, if you mount it upside down, it won't flash
I had that on my Suburban in Texas. Not sure where it is illegal, but my car had that as a dealer option.
I use https://www.neutrinoblackbox.com/ for same with great success. I tapped my brake line electronics and the app lets me set up the sensitivity for when decelerating brightens them up. Also a lot of other fun features you can read about on their site.
"BMW’s dynamic brake light, for example, flashes during emergency braking to alert trailing drivers, greatly enhancing road safety."
This isn't obvious to someone who has no idea. I just assumed it's an aftermarket adjustment for people that like flashy vehicles.
Many of them flashy lights are just flashy. Some underregulated regions you'll quickly get tired of every car being like a christmas tree trying to one up each other what patterns their stop or turning lights do or how bright they are (and for front lights just how bright they are and how many).
This makes it an arms race because the average driver loses sensitivity and then what used to be enough is now too subdued and unsafe (even if technically enough by law). Reminds me of how some regions require ad breaks to have audio not louder than the main production, while others are just straight up loudness wars on your ears
There's something to be said for setting a standard and keeping driving competence high and being less annoying to others including pedestrians.
(A bike is a slightly different story, it's harder to see how far away is a solo light. But then this is also a culture where half the riders believe that deafening bystanders is important for safety so sometimes hard to sympathize)
I don't think that matters, isn't the point just that it's more eye-catching than a solid (and much smaller than a car's) light?
Any driver should know what a brake light means, I don't think that it's an intentional flash feature is important to know.
I don't think you can have it both ways, either all lights are the same OR one is more important and drivers will all think first "is it this or that light? do I hit the brakes? maybe this means he is stopping slowly so I will risk my rear end for no reason?" before they act. I'm sure it isn't going to backfire
Where's the quest to make motorcycles a huge bit quieter? I am so fed up with all the loud motorcycles in my city. Seems pretty arrogant of people with loud vehicles to think that we all want to hear them.
This is an old problem that was solved and not solved. Most motorcycles in the past 25 years are decently quiet, unless you rev it up at night and everyone will hear it. But it is the same with the cars. At the same time, there is a significant number of motorcycles with non-street legal mufflers that add some decibels, you hear those even during the day at low revs.
I have 2 bikes, both stock exhaust, both quiet. The older one with the Euro 3 and larger engine is more quiet than the one that is Euro 5 and has a small engine, but none is loud enough to wake anyone at night if I come home at that time. At the same time, a couple of neighbors with fancy Akrapovic cans will wake up the entire street every time they pass by.
Alternatively, just switch to electric bikes maybe?
So that, even if they want to try and be noisy, they cannot really? (except with loud music maybe, but that's completely different, wayyyy less stressful for people around, and it's already possible so that would not add a new problem)
If anything modern motorcycles are sometimes a bit too quiet. The stock exhausts make them sound like cars when idling. And low-revving engines can barely cut through the traffic noise.
Ok the kind of narrative you are pushing should definitely be banned along with the noisy machines themselves. As some have said in the comments, it has been debunked numerous times in studies.
With the same reasoning as yours, I'll have a 500W HiFi with speakers and subwoofers on me, shouting annoying and loud noise continuously while I walk in the streets? To be noticed when I cross as a pedestrian or on my bicycle?
Or, like, people could just careful? Around me people drive carefully and they don't hurt cyclists or electric bikes.
I do very similar things manually already. I engine break and apply very light rear break pressure to trigger my break lights, and let off the rear break and reapply it for the “flashing” effect. Once at a complete stop and in neutral I flash my break lights off/on until the car behind me is at a complete stop.
The benefit of this is tool is that it reduces cognitive load while also working in emergency situations where I’m more focused on operating the motorcycle than signaling to others.
Out of curiosity, wouldn't an accelerometer alone not work for this purpose? I see you've hooked it up with engine RPM as well, but realistically you want to indicate when you're slowing down, no matter the reason, right? Is there something I'm fundamentally missing here?
This is a great idea though, and definitely something that more bikes should come stock with. There's a very clear benefit for safety.
Thank you for your question, it does not hook with the engine RPM, but I did have an issue with the sample rate syncing with the engine rpm therefore picking up noise, I solved that issue with randomizing the sample interval with pseudo random numbers.
Ah okay, I thought I must be missing something. Cool product, I hope it does well.
You should also soft-mount the accelerometer to minimize vibration transmission.
Great idea. I thought about this when I rented an electric Renault car, and found that in regenerative braking mode… brake lights do not come on when lifting the foot off the accelerator. A friend in a car behind said he found it confusing and wondered what I was doing. Such a bizarre design flaw not to have brake lights come on when this happens.
Road bike tail lights have had IMU controlled brake light functionality for years. Even fairly cheap ones from Aliexpress. Example: https://youtu.be/iH-dYDkd_U0?t=123
It's a nice story. Some statistics might help motivate concern. E.g., The disproportionate risk per mile for motorcycling is chilling. But in California "rear end" as a category appears to be only about 15% of all MC accidents, and even then the category doesn't distinguish being hit from hitting.
I suspect a lot of the effort here is marketing, so you might extract extra value (and do more good) with a complementary product.
A big benefit might come from controllable red light and warning bell for the rider when you're more than 15% over speed limit. Speed is the biggest risk by far, and also the risk you can control (since no brake light can defend against the inattentive driver). It's way too easy to not realize how fast you're going.
Indeed, for that you could also factor in stopping distances. Starting out with lighter, nimble bikes, I got in real trouble with the 650+ lb monsters that dither about stopping. Those would get a lower threshold. And you'd apply a higher threshold for open road vs. traffic, etc.
Then build out a UI workflow and logging, and it might grow into an interesting intelligent copilot product line addressing all the pilot-controllable factors. As a motorcyclist, it's really on you to save your own bacon.
20 years riding bikes and I never knew I have this problem. Even now I don't have it. It sounds like a nice gimmick but not a solution to a real problem, at least not for European traffic where bikes are reasonably fine and where the top cause of motorcycle fatalities is riding way too fast.
This could help but the most dangerous situations I experienced myself were, when someone was coming from the side (perpendicular), especially on T-junctions.
Classic "sorry mate I didn't see you" case.
Not sure smart braking light in the back would help much here.
the biggest way to make a motorcycle safer, IMO, is remove the need for shifting.
Lower the center of gravity, reduce the weight, increase the wind protection, make the riding stance really comfortable.
Make it easily accommodate a backpack, or a passenger, or both.
And you have a scooter!
They're unconventional in the greater usa, but wildly fun.
Generally, it seems like one can entertain the best parts of a bicycle, feet, and a car, and a motorcycle, all in one.
I wrote a bit of an ode to scooters, here: https://josh.works/scootering
I wish more of my friends rode scooters!
https://josh.works/scootering
I've always felt safer in motorcycles compared to scooters. Something about the handling in scooters doesn't feel reassuring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's more apparent when you ride on patchy, broken roads. It's much easier riding over bumps, zigzagging to avoid potholes on a motorcycle. Of course, I'm comparing motorcycles and scooters of similar weight. Riding a litre class machine is a different dimension altogether.
I crashed recently after someone in front applied break too hard and too late. Couldn’t walk for two weeks—something like BrakeBright would’ve been a gamechanger. How do you prevent false triggers on bumpy roads though?
The issue with brake lights is they are binary on/off. It would likely be better if the brightness would vary by how hard the braking is. Like getting brighter and brighter and then rapidly flashing.
Every car would have to have the same brightness for their brake lights for this to work well. At night, cars in the US have their brake lights partially illuminated as running lights. On some cars these are so bright that it looks like they're actively braking.
Brightness would be hard to discern in the sun. Cars have center stop light strip, it would be cool if amount of illuminated segments would be proportional to deceleration. Probably not legal though.
> Brightness would be hard to discern in the sun
Nothing is perfect.
If the binary isn’t working then you are following too close and no method is truly safe
> If the binary isn’t working then you are following too close
There isn't always have a choice. If you open a gap in traffic, another car will simply change lanes into it.
> no method is truly safe
That's not a reason for not making things safer.
I sold my bike and gave up riding because it was just too dangerous. It's not just that people don't see you, they're not even looking anymore, they're on their phones.
We need an app that turns off drivers' phones when they are within 100m of a motorcyclist.
This would be a fantastic standard feature for aftermarket tail lights - which used to be nigh-obligatory because OEMs still hadn't adopted LEDs.
Throttle position sensor would be another data source, but model-specific.
same as with cars - it seems the technology that is actually built in the products is just the annoying / useless ones instead of technology that would be actually useful e.g. to safety
That's actually brilliant. Same issue w/ some sports cars too or even cars coasting in slow stop and go traffic when coming up from behind from high speed traffic.
I have a garage full of motos (currently 9, probably half of which are relevant) if you want someone to help test your product.
Really nice project.
If you are thinking commercial you may want to look into IP issues to see if there are active patents (probably expired by now?)
As far as design choices, based on my journeys in similar types of projects: (just my$.02, not a critique)
USB will be a significant point of failure. The connector has voltage present and electrochemical activity will destroy the connector over time unless you can keep it in a clean, low humidity environment. Consider a different connector or a wireless SOC to eliminate this point of failure and make a completely potted unit possible. If you use usb, make sure there is no voltage normally present, even from the data connections, and you have a good watertight plug for the access port. Everything gets wet on bikes. Everything. nRF52840 or ESP32C3 would be my go to choices here, but there are a lot of excellent candidates. BLE is probably the protocol you will want to use. This will facilitate making a simple app to do firmware updates and feature adjustments.
Consider eliminating the need for RPM input. This will be a significant point of failure and your greatest installation headache across different motorcycles.
As a failsafe, control the lamp output pass-through with a pulled-up mosfet of at least 50a capacity (you won’t ever see this high current, but it protects from bulb changing short circuits and other unknowns)
An Infineon BTS5016-2EKA or its low side equivalent is probably a great choice, and gives you both of the switches you need in one package, for less than $3, with full protection features. ( I assume you will need one to interrupt existing signaling and one to light where’s there is no activation from the brake switches)
The main thing is the lamp must light with regular inputs even if the circuit loses power or the chip gets a hole drilled in it. If it comes on when it shouldn’t, that is also bad, but not as bad.
Idk what sensor you are using, but consider the icm20948, it’s not too expensive ($3-4) and it has onboard sensor fusion. Only downside is it’s 1.8v, but if you use the nRf52840 that’s not an issue. Even so, level conversion isn’t too big a deal. Sensor fusion will greatly simplify understanding what’s going on.
Since power consumption is not critical I would consider using an ML algorithm on the sensor data to detect hazard conditions, lie downs, etc and filter out steep uphill/downhill false activation/failure to activate.
You could collect the data easily and train a simple model with off the shelf tools designed specifically for doing that kind of thing with MCUs. I forget the name but it’s commonly used for voice action or gesture training. You might want to train on a few bikes though, especially ones with different vibration frequencies.
Now you can add a subscription model for premium flashing features and “enhanced AI” with in-app GPT4 access to an interactive tour guide and a “best rides” feature customized to your riding style and search history! Business could pay-to play, and insurance companies, motorcycle manufacturers, and tire sellers would love that personally identifiable riding data! (Please, don’t)
It's not the first per say. https://admorelighting.com/
Their owners manual for their braking light bar lists Patent # 10,363,865, but I don't know if this applies 1 to 1.
This would also be useful on my 2-door Civic.
I was only thinking about bikes, but I lift/downshift in my BRZ all the time. I guess there is much less fear of being mangled by a cel phone user when I'm in the car. Looks like I will be ordering 4 of these.
indeed
I feel like I see more motorcycles doing stupid things on the roadway than I used to.
A legal mandate should be made to require this on all motorbikes.
I ride motorcyles so found this quite interesting.
Instead of a motion sensor, why not simply turn on the brakes whenever you down shift and leave it on until the throttle is engaged?
That requires you to have a bike where the current gear is recognized digitally and the bike has a standard way of getting that data to an external device (or it requires you to put a sensor on the gear lever). For that matter, it requires you to have a bike with a manual transmission. There's lots of electric bikes, bikes with fully automatic transmissions, and bikes that simply don't have the electronics (not to mention a standard way to interface with them).
Actually in thinking about it, if you had access (digitally) to the current gear, you probably also have tachometer and velocity data as well through whatever that connection is anyway.
On the other hand, a motion sensor works for all bikes and is quite robust.
You can infer the gear based on vehicle speed and engine speed.
That's how gear indications work on most manual cars too: there's no actual sensor telling what gear is selected (other than reverse, and sometimes clutch pedal and neutral).
> You can infer the gear based on vehicle speed and engine speed.
Wouldn't that be highly variable based on the vehicle itself? Especially considering personal modifications tend to be common for motorbikes.
Yes, but you could calibrate it once manually.
> Especially considering personal modifications tend to be common for motorbikes.
Including gearbox? The only thing relevant for the functionality would be the transmission ratio for each gear.
People often change sprockets which changes the final drive ratio.
Yes that makes it harder to make a general system. It could have a "learning" function to pick this up though.
If you have vehicle speed and engine speed you simply don't need to know the gear to know when engine braking is happening.
An existing brake light product, the Billy light from Clearwater, integrates with the BMW canbus to pull the bike's acceleration data and use that as a basis for what this light appears to do.
I can imagine there's enough of a market for BMW accessories that they can make it work, but if you want to address other bikes with the same device, you need a different approach.
Agreed, I was more responding to the idea of tying into existing sensors or motorcycle data as noted above. The light I mentioned is part of a bigger lighting system that works through a CAN interface and has all kinds of control of settings through a somewhat convoluted overlay on existing bike inputs, like press this switch, then these, then turn the wonder wheel to adjust brightness.
I don't think that would work in cases where rev-matching is used.
EV’s need this too! I’m noticing my Tesla isn’t doing a great job turning on the brake lights during one pedal driving. It seems to need pretty hard deceleration before they come on.
I actually think it is lame when engine braking activates the brake light. There are two distinct behaviors: slowing down gently, with engine braking, and slowing down intensely with physical brake application. When I am engine braking like going down a long hill I do not want to flag the drivers behind me that I am braking ... I just want to use the compression of the engine to regulate my speed. Anyone who lives in a mountainous area will tell you this. Seeing solid brake lights going down the hill is a red flag / skill issue. Some manufacturers have begun to add artificial brake lights during engine braking though and I find it disingenuous.
I’m trying to understand this comment - are you saying that there’s an advantage to drivers behind you not thinking you’re braking? As in - you don’t want them to think you’re coming to a complete stop when you’re regulating your speed?
Or are you saying that you don’t want them to think you have a skill issue ?
I live in a semi mountainous area, where people driving automatics ride their brakes most of the way down the mountains. (Relatively small mountains, elevations ranging from 1,900-2,700 with the surrounding area around 1,000-1,100 elevation. So not the same necessity of engine braking as somewhere out west where the elevation is 3-6k average with mountains up to 12-14k).
engine braking is not braking - is what I am trying to imply
holding your speed or decellerating mildly is not the same as braking. if i gear down into a higher rpm and hold my speed, or perhaps decel ever so slightly - its not worth alerting the driver behind you. most people over-react to brake lights and will see your brakes as "I should apply brakes too" when in this particularly case, they should not.
I can't think of a single circumstance where compression braking should cause a brake light to illuminate. the rate of decelleration is so small compared to even a gentle tap of the brakes, that it will merely confuse drivers behind you.
I think perhaps this may be different drivers. The scenario I dislike is that drivers seem to fly up behind me, and then brake even heavier, when I’m using engine braking and then tailgate for a period. (For example, I’m going 40 in a 35, and they flew up behind me going 60).
If I tap my brake lights as they’re approaching, they slow more gradually and follow at an appropriate distance.
This is anecdotal of course.
I think the issue is that I’m using engine braking, while those around me are not.
Ummmm
When one is driving downhill with a car in gear, one is maintaining speed, not slowing down. Hence there is no need to show a brake light.
Driving down a long hill using (friction) brakes to maintain your speed is a quick way to cause excessive wear on your brakes and, in extreme cases, lead to overheating and brake fade or failure.
This is required knowledge for the UK driving test BTW.
Sorry - I should clarify I downshift. I understand the difference. I drove manual most of my life. (Somewhat unusual in the USA )
However, I frequently see drivers fly down the mountain behind me, and then brake heavily. The drivers in front of me, have their brake lights on in front of me usually the entire time or nearly.
However: high compression engines will slow you at a rate similar to light braking in many circumstances, unless your gearing and the slope of the hill is just right.
On my motorcycle, if I’ve downshifted to an amount that it will stop acceleration due to the slope, it will begin to decelerate me.
Even in my current car, the difference between 3rd and 4th is 4th allowing the car to continue to accelerate to ~20 mph over the speed limit, where 3rd will hold briefly but begin to decelerate the vehicle as the slope decreases. While I can shift between them to moderate the speed, it’s not always worthwhile. Again, I’m applying specific scenarios where the “mountain” road is maybe 1-1.5 miles maximum.
The specific scenario I dislike is that if I’m using engine braking(say to maintain 35-43 mph in a 35 zone), and don’t tap my brake lights - people fly down doing 60, and the brake heavily, tailgate for a period, and then follow at a normal distance.
If I tap my brakes to trigger the lights as they approach, they begin to slow further away and don’t do the hard slowdown.
Anecdotal of course.
The difference may be that where I am in the USA many people are not using engine braking.
thanks for your comment, the device is self leveling, I live in a hilly Scotland, it keeps adjusting itself with the slopes and only reacts to sudden changes.
that is good. the rate of decel is more important than a strict boolean.
Agree and currently it's a dealbreaker to me, however I'm certain it will become optional in the future iterations.
The only safe way - just don’t.
"Committed to empowering users, I developed a subsequent version incorporating a USB port. Currently, I’m finalizing user-friendly software utilities, enabling riders to easily update BrakeBright firmware, customize features, and personalize the system to match individual riding styles and preferences."
A brake light that requires system administration?