You wear a bike helmet to keep safe. So it is a shock to find a faulty helmet design that could actually make things worse in a crash.

I bought a Giro Escape urban helmet in 2022. I wanted a lid with integrated lights for my weekly commute across London. After a few months, the strap came loose, and the helmet fell to the ground as I got to the office in the City of London.

Giro were very good, refunding me without quibble, and I bought a second Giro Escape, assuming the first helmet had a manufacturing fault. I loved the fit and the bright LED lights – just what I needed cycling home along dark country lanes after getting off the London train.

Yet after six months the same thing happened to the replacement. As I set off on my commute the helmet felt very loose, and I wondered how I could have forgotten to do it up. Then I found the two sides of the buckle were firmly attached: it was the strap that had come loose.

I contacted Giro, and was surprised by its response:

This is not something we have had reported to us often, especially 2 in a row for the same customer.
 
We would recommend that you reattach the clip and set the strap to the correct length. A small stitch through the loose part of the strap may stop this from happening.

Giro customer support by email, 16 january 2024

In other words, we expect you to redesign our helmet to make it safe to use.

To be fair, when I pointed out how unreasonable this response was Giro quickly agreed to refund me. But my second incident showed the dangerous design fault in the Giro Escape helmet. If I bought a third helmet, the same thing would happen again.

Let me explain the fault. The right side Escape strap is attached to the buckle by a very loose rectangle of soft plastic. It simply isn’t secure or tight enough to stop the strap working its way out of this loop and detaching from the buckle. I have made a video showing how easily this happens:

Within a day, another Escape user commented that they had exactly the same problem.

I then discovered that the design flaw isn’t restricted to Giro’s Escape helmets. It had recalled Merit helmets in North America, Australia and New Zealand because, in Giro’s words, quoted by BikeRadar, “the helmet strap may detach from the helmet when “pulled with relatively little force, posing a risk of injury to the user in a crash”. That’s exactly what happened to my two Escape helmets, happily without a crash.

So, Giro, how long are you going to continue selling the unsafe Escape helmet?