ATV manufacturers distort quad bike deaths in fight against rollbars

Yamaha and Honda have been ridiculed for claiming rollover protection devices played a role in three quad bike deaths.

PETER HUNT

3 min read

June 19, 2019 - 12:00AM

The Weekly Times

Company stand: Yamaha and Honda last month launched a video in their campaign against rollbars being mandatory for new bikes.

QUAD bike manufacturers Yamaha and Honda have been accused of “defiling the dead” in their campaign to ban rollover bars, hiring a US consultant to claim “three deaths have occurred” as a result of the devices.

The claim has been ridiculed by the nation’s safety experts, who said the Japanese giants should be ashamed, especially when one of the deaths involved a young Australian killed in a head-on collision in Malawi, not a rollover.

Yamaha and Honda are using US consultant Scott Kebschull as an expert witness and to act as the front man in their “ban the bar” campaign video.

Scott Kebschull.

In the video Mr Kebschull warns, “an OPD has a real chance of causing death in a rollover that would otherwise be survivable. We know about three deaths that have occurred with OPDs, one was in Malawi and two were in Australia.”

In 2011 The Weekly Times reported the young Australian killed in Malawi on a quad bike fitted with an OPD died when a vehicle fleeing police veered on to the wrong side of the road and ploughed into him.

Ironically, the rider, Valerio De Simoni, who joined two Australian mates in 2010 to ride Yamaha quad bikes through 34 countries and raise $100,000 for charity, had posted a blog in the weeks leading up to his death praising the OPD after rolling his bike down a sand dune in the Sahara Desert.

In his report on the Sahara incident, Mr De Simoni wrote: “The Quad Bar took the impact of myself, and all of the equipment I have on top of our special edition Yamaha Grizzly 700 quad bikes, equalling a total weight of impact of 500kg. The Quad Bar is a MUST for any intelligent quad bike rider.”

At the time The Weekly Times revealed Yamaha had airbrushed the OPDs off promotional photographs of the three charity riders, who it was sponsoring.

Yamaha even pressured the two remaining riders, Jamie Kenyon and Kristopher Davant, into removing the bars from their bikes once they arrived back in Australia for the last stage of their 50,000km journey, stating it “would be unable to support” anyone using quad bars.

Transport safety researcher Keith Simmons said Yamaha and Honda were paying Kebschull “to propagate this rubbish and defile the memory of the dead”.

“Their game is blatant,” Mr Simmons said. “The US body of manufacturers will face crippling or bankrupting lawsuits if the families of the dead, or those who have survived with life changing and lifetime care injuries ever find out there is a safety solution to rollover crashes and the industry have denied it from the quad bike user.

“They are today’s tobacco or asbestos manufacturing industry and their tactics are the same.”

Honda faces possible legal action in NSW over a rider was left a paraplegic, while the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries last week withdrew a challenge to Victorian WorkSafe’s push to have workplace quad bikes fitted with OPDs.

Yamaha and Honda launched the Kebschull video last month as part of their “ban the bar” campaign, which is trying to get the Federal Government to dismiss an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recommendation for OPDs on all new quad bikes.

Former Australian Centre for Agricultural Health & Safety director Tony Lower said the quad bike manufacturers actions were shameful, given Mr Kebschull not only claimed Mr Di Simoni’s, but two other Australians’ deaths had occurred with OPDs.

Mr Lower said one of those deaths involved a rider killed on an OPD-fitted quad bike in the Snowy Mountains, when he was thrown from his bike, hitting his head on a rock.

“It had nothing to do with the OPD,” Mr Lower said.

With the third death, in Tasmania, the state’s Coroner found the quad bike was “fitted with (a) large square ‘after market’ rack, apparently designed to carry fauna”, not an approved OPD.