If instead of disabling the airbag, they simply repossessed the whole jacket, nobody would give a rat's ass. That's called a rental and it's a legitimate business model (though not one that I'd ever take for lifesaving equipment).

Instead, they intentionally added failure modes to their equipment - Making it worse even for customers that bought it up front, because now that code is hanging out and may be accidentally activated.

Or purposefully.

It looks like they got the marketing badly wrong, because we should be talking about how clever the bag is etc, but instead we don't give a monkey's. Gah. MotoGP has mandatory airbag suits, with accelerometers and gyros. Racing is obviously different, there's no cars and trucks to run you over, but top speeds are completely insane, so the tech might well translate over to the road.

It appears their bet was that by having the upfront cost be discounted and making the money back in "service" payments, they increase access to those that might otherwise not be comfortable footing the high upfront cost. The product isn't a motorcycle jacket, it's a financial instrument with life-and-death usury rates. In some sense, it's probably impossible to market a product like this well.

> it's probably impossible to market a product like this well.

At the right price, with 100% uptime, motorcycle airbags would be a monster hit product. I say that with confidence because as a motorcycle rider who is aware of the stats which tell me we risk death and serious injury 8X more than car drivers.

I want a motorcycle airbag - at the right price and conditions.

Who doesn't?

And why don't they exist?

What would be the cost to manufacture them at the rate of 500 million a year? That's the global market potential.

p.s. Do motorcycle airbags actually work to significantly prevent injury and death? If the answer is that they aren't particularly efficacious anyway, even when ideally implemented, I can understand why they scarcely exist in the market.

> What would be the cost to manufacture them at the rate of 500 million a year? That's the global market potential.

Completely agreed. The fact that there's one bad product on the market doesn't mean that one can conclude that our system rewards bad products, per the GGP comment.

> p.s. Do motorcycle airbags actually work to significantly prevent injury and death? If the answer is that they aren't particularly efficacious anyway, even when ideally implemented, I can understand why they scarcely exist in the market.

Probably not! I think time will tell.