A 2006 study showed that “280,000 people in the U.S. receive a motor vehicle induced traumatic brain injury every year” so you would think that wearing a helmet while driving would be commonplace. Race car drivers wear helmets. But since almost no one wears a helmet while driving a regular car, you probably fear that if you wore one you would look silly, attract the notice of the police for driving while weird, or the attention of another driver who took your safety attire as a challenge. (Car drivers are more likely to hit bicyclists who wear helmets.)
The $30+shipping Crasche hat is designed for people who should wear a helmet but don’t. It looks like a ski cap, but contains concealed lightweight protective material. People who have signed up for cryonics, such as myself, would get an especially high expected benefit from using a driving helmet because we very much want our brains to “survive” even a “fatal” crash. I have been using a Crasche hat for about a week.
How much do these helmets reduce risk and how much do they cost to buy & use? That's tricky to answer, but maybe some bounds will be helpful.
\$685 in present value is roughly equivalent to \$27 spent each year over the next 50 years, discounting at 3% (
sum(sapply(1:50, function(t) { 27 * 0.97^t }))
). So even something which reduced your car TBI risk to zero would not be worth paying more than \$27 each year for the rest of your life. The mentioned helmets all sound like they only reduce acceleration or energy somewhat, and Crasche is quoted by Dorikka as estimating a 25% reduction in impact (which translates to an unknown reduction in TBI risk); another quote claims seatbelts reduce death/injury by ~50%. Let's be extremely optimistic and go with the latter, that our TBI risk falls by 50% using a Crasche helmet. Then the gain from a Crasche helmet is685 * 0.5
= \$342.The cost of the Crasche helmet is ~\$30, leaving \$312. Let's assume there's never any replacements and we just need to consider the annual hassle of wearing it. Working backwards again, that leaves room for an annual cost of no more than ~\$12.3, which is small. I drive maybe thrice a week, so the per-trip cost of use needs to be <
12.3 / (52*3)
or <\$0.07. Alternatively, if we don't think the Crasche helmet is remotely sufficient, a much better helmet might cost more like \$100 up front, leaving \$242, leaving \$9.5 for annual expenses, or <\$0.06.Personally, while I don't mind driving with a helmet as much as \$1 an hour (and so extremely high annually) like some people claim, I think I would mind a nickel's worth each trip, which defeats Crasche even with extremely optimistic assumptions on efficacy. If we wanted to make Crasche cost-effective, we could argue that \$100k/year is a better value, which will double estimates of benefit; or we could try to expand our sources of harm to include TBIs from other sources like falls (although that would also increase the cost of usage: it's one thing to only need to wear it in your car where no one will see, another thing to walk around routinely wearing it); or we could deny discounting, which increases the loss considerably and helps overcome the fixed present cost of buying the helmet. But to be fair, we'd also want to reduce the efficacy of Crasche to much less than 50%, take into account that we're wearing seat belts while a large fraction of TBI cases likely were not, consider the advent of self-driving cars in the next 15 years reducing human error rates, and overall, I'm not seeing much that looks like it could make a driving helmet the sort of slamdunk case that one can make for, say, vitamin D. As far as car safety goes, a helmet feels like it's going to be inferior to stuff like getting a dashcam, upgrading to an electric car with its bigger crumple zones & higher mechanical reliability (I understand the Tesla cars may be the safest ones on the market right now), saving up for self-driving cars, making a habit of reinflating tires more regularly, taking a defensive driving class, etc - to say nothing of much larger risks like falling getting out of the shower. (I installed some anti-slip treads after I did just that; feels like money well-spent every time I step out.)
The same also applies to walking helmets: falls are highly concentrated in the elderly and very young (while car TBIs are more evenly distributed) and you would need to wear a helmet almost 24/7 once you've guarded against ice and shower falls (increasing costs much more over car TBIs). So race-car drivers, football players*, people at much higher than usual risks? Probably, maybe. Regular people? Not really.
* although I would say after reading through all the football studies and these TBI studies, I would not, hypothetically, let my children ever play contact football and especially not highschool football. If they want to play sports, there must be safer ones they could try. Like BASE jumping.
"Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes", Sariaslan et al 2016, is a population registry study which reports within-family correlations adjust for education about various negative outcomes with 1 or more diagnosed TBIs representing 9.1% of the population (their twin sample was too small); within-family studies control for tons of the usual confounders (and indeed the correlations are smaller than if you had used the ge... (read more)