Remember kids... always wear a helmet. (The almighty bikeradar helmet thread)

It's pretty common, people claim a helmet saved their life and it turns out their helmet failed.

Again, that's not necessarily what that link says. It only says it failed if the styrofoam didn't compress. Any data on that? Not many people are checking to see if the styrofoam has compressed during an impact, regardless of whether helmet has cracked or not. Of course, any claim that a helmet's performance has been life saving is likely to be speculative...

There's also the curious confidence of helmet wearers boasting about the crashes they keep having...

Yeah that's the bit that gets me too. Literally no one wore cycle helmets pre about the 90s. Going by the rate of broken-helmet-saved-my-life stories since, you'd think the pre 90s rate of biking head injury fatality must have been epidemic. But it wasn't.

I don't even remember the last time I came off the bike, let alone hit my head doing so. Can't remember having an accident on my current commute and I've been in this job 5 years new.

Of course, the fact I ride this probably has something to do with it....

But that's the point - helmets make sense for some styles of riding but are an inconvenient irrelevance for others.