First, read this, and maybe watch the video there.

Then read the following passage from the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published eighteen years ago (1992) and one of my favorite near-future SF novels. One of the main characters is a teenage girl who goes by the handle “YT” and couriers messages by skateboard for her pocket money — often riding it on the freeway, carried along by passing vehicles by way of a magnetic harpoon gun with an unbreakable line, her high-tech board automatically dealing with obstacles and road irregularities with millimeter-wave radar and segmented “smart wheels.”

She has been captured and is being transported by helicopter, but has managed to get out and is presently hanging about fifteen feet above the freeway, being carried along at a speed she estimates to be about 45 miles per hour:

She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.

At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall’s collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the armorgel.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t hurt when she lands. She can’t see anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires squealing. Finally, she goes butt first through someone’s windshield and ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier. The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it away from her face.

That new “cyclist collar” might not have been inspired by Snow Crash — the basic idea is pretty obvious when you set out to solve the problem of a bicyclist (or skateboarder) who can’t or doesn’t want to wear a helmet. But I’d give even odds that it was. 🙂