airbags are not balloons to bounce off of... they are cushions to absorb impact and WILL NOT bounce you away. a 150pound+ person would have way too much momentum for that sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbags
I understand that they aren't balloons to "bounce" off, I guess I wasn't really trying to be that literal
, which is my bad. However, in a car you have several axes of movement restrained by your seatbelt, seat, and the structure of the vehicle. On a motorcycle none of your axes are constrained, and with possible alterations to the position/pitch of the vehicle itself altering how you would contact the bag I'm not really sure that on a bike the airbag would be even close to as effective as in a car. Especially now that "front" airbags have become more sensitive to the type of impact, only deploying in certain situations (namely direct frontal and rear end type events), really narrowing cases of deployments. An airbag on a bike would only be good for those type of events anyway (no side impact bags obviously), and would offer nothing for laying your bike down or a high side. I suppose that for cases where you rear end someone, or plow directly into someone making a left in front of you (which is a significant percentage of fatalities) it might help provided you hit the bag somewhat square.But if your bike slid out slightly and you dismounted to one side or the other, you'd only see a glancing blow on the bag due to the angle of impact, and while this would still reduce the total impact force it would not be hard to re-direct you as well. Several fatalities have occurred when a firefighter has been blown out the back window of a vehicle by being against the bag when it accidentally deploys, so the ability to redirect momentum should be pretty clear.Not that they would be useless, but I think for the most part its just some engineers spending way too much time to come up with a fancy gadget so the dealership can tack on a few more grand to your new 'wing. But thats just my .02...
