Yamaha’s plan for airbags on scooters revealed

We all know that you can’t fit airbags to sportbikes, largely because of the almost-prone riding position that the sporty motorcycles sit the rider in – an airbag can’t be sited under the chest of the rider for obvious reasons.

So where can you fit an airbag in the modern motorcycling world? We’ve had one on the Honda Gold Wing for the past ten years, and that’s been about it so far. No cruiser, Adventure bike or big tourer has yet appeared with the big bang bag tech in place.

Yamaha might be on a mission to change all that though with this, a new patent design for airbags on scooters. There’s no information about when we’ll see this in production-ready form, but it’s definitely on the way from the Japanese firm.

In the design drawings, the scooter is fitted with a large airbag that fills the void between the rider’s chest and the headstock of the scooter with secondary bags deploying to save the rider’s legs from smashing into the scooter’s lower fairing.