Originally Posted by
crhilton
Gotta love special interest stories: They have their own dialect of english.
I'm not gonna disagree that this kid might have been saved by his helmet. I'd yield to the people who saw the scene and his helmet. However, anecdotes are still just anecdotes.
We'll never know if the helmet did any good, and although some claim it did, they most probably did based on emotions.
There was study done up here that examined every collision between bicycles and motor vehicles over a 3 year period.
Every death of a cyclist was from a collision with a motor vehicle but certainly not every collision with a motor vehicle resulted in death. In fact, the most common outcome in these collisions was, no injury at all. In over 6,000 collisions between the 2, there were only 18 deaths. That's a 97% survival rate.
It seems statistically unlikely that a helmet saved a life and seems even less likely considering they are made for falls that do not involve a third party
(i.e. motor vehicles).