DOT Motorcycle Helmet Guide
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
If you’re a first time rider, you might hear talk of so-called DOT Motorcycle Helmets. But if you’re like I was when I first started riding, you’ll have no idea what a DOT Motorcycle Helmet actually is. You’ll hear people bounce the word around and maybe you realize it’s related to safety, but the question will remain: what does “DOT” mean? And more importantly, how the heck does DOT relate to Motorcycle Helmets?
Well, fear not. I’m here to set the record straight and help you understand just exactly what a DOT Motorcycle Helmet is, and what it means for you.
First things first: DOT stands for “Department of Transportation”. Simply put, a motorcycle helmet with a DOT sticker has been safety-certified by the Department of Transportation. The importance of this lies (apart from safety) in the fact that states with helmet laws usually require you to wear DOT-certified motorcycle helmets. Luckily for you, finding a motorcycle helmet that *isn’t* DOT certified is actually quite difficult these days. This is because all motorcycle helmets sold in the United States must, by law, meet the DOT safety requirements.
But what ARE those requirements, and what do they mean?
That’s a reasonable thing to wonder. So here’s the deal. The design details of a DOT Motorcycle Helmet (i.e. what DOT is really looking for in a safe helmet) can be explained across several general categories (by the way, you can always wander on over to the NHTSA website for further, though somewhat boring, explanations). You can learn, through this set of basic features, how to verify the legitimacy of a DOT motorcycle helmet when you’re purchasing from a private party or unknown shop.
So here ya go folks, the basic criteria by which you can recognize a genuine DOT motorcycle helmet:
First: Inner Liner. Inner Liner is another way of saying the polystyrene foam that does the real work of protecting your skull in a crash. A genuine DOT motorcycle helmet is gonna have a liner that’s about an inch thick, so if you pick up a helmet with a DOT sticker and the shell is extremely thin, or just plain plastic, then you know it’s not the genuine article.
Second: we’ll look at rivets, chin straps, as well as helmet weight and surface design. These are a few design features that give you a “quick glance” idea of whether a helmet is legit. Rivets and chin strap are easy to recognize: does the DOT motorcycle helmet look like it’s gonna hold together?Do you see a chin strap?How bout weight? Genuine DOT motorcycle helmets will weight somewhere around three pounds. As before, we’re not dealing with precise numbers here. The idea is simply that the helmet doesn’t feel like it’s only a pound or so. Last but not least in this category: design. It’s against regulations for a DOT motorcycle helmet to have surface features protruding beyond 2/10ths of an inch. So, sad though it may be, a german motorcycle helmet with a huge spike ain’t no DOT-certified helmet.
So there you have some quick, fast ways to get a “gut check” on whether a helmet is genuine DOT certified. Usually you’ve got nothing to worry about, but in a sketchy set of circumstances, it never hurts to be prepared. Just because there’s a sticker on a helmet doesn’t always mean it’s the real deal. So if you ever end up buying from a private party, always go in prepared with some basic knowledge of DOT motorcycle helmet’s aesthetics and design!
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