Motorcycle Personal Protective Equipment
Motorcycle helmets have had to comply to safety testing standards for decades, the most well known being the current ECE2205 that is now being upgraded to ECE2206 (this will become the only sellable standard from January 2024. Of course you can continue to wear your ECE2205 approved helmet after that date for as long as it is performing as it should). As for the rest of your clothing, until 2018 you could walk into a motorcycle shop to look at jackets, trousers, boots, gloves and assumed that they were being sold as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and in most cases this was not the case. Many manufacturers avoided selling it as PPE by adding a label inside jackets or trousers declaring that it did not conform to any protection standards and offered no such protection. So in the end much of it was all just ‘leisure wear’. If armour was added then the armour itself had to comply to CE standards of protection but the rest of the garment could be made out of anything.
Since April 2018 all motorcycle clothing sold with a claim that it is protective now falls under PPE legislation and must comply. Any grace period to clear out existing stock is long over.
For jackets and trousers the standard is EN17092 and will show a label inside like this.
Be aware that a motorcycle dealer can sell clothing that does not conform to this or any PPE standard, but they must not make claims that it is protective. It can only be classed as leisure wear. Within the EN17092 standard there are 3 levels of increasing resilience to look for, mainly in terms of slide time; A, AA and AAA.
As regards inserted armour, this is tested to EN1621 and has 2 levels of increasing resilience – level 1 and level 2.
Gloves are tested to EN1394 and boots to EN13634 and again have 2 levels (1,2) of possible protection.
Check for these standards when buying your gear and understand what level of protection you are buying.
