A lot of helmet companies can make motorcycle helmets. But Arai alone can also claim the unparalleled world-class quality, reputation, and technology to be chosen by more than half the drivers on the Formula-1 grid.
Arai alone is chosen by both the 2008 Indianapolis 500 winner and the rookie of the year!
By NASCAR® heroes like Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, and Juan Pablo Montoya.
Not to mention all four current American MotoGP racers. And so on.
Which tells you just how really special and different these helmets are. Bottom line: Arai alone can dominate areas of motorsports others can't conceive of even competing in.
"Innovation in pursuit of a better riding experience" might sound like the mantra of every helmet maker. The reality is, it's not.
Because if making you feel safer and more comfortable in a better-fitting helmet for hours and hours at a time, day after day, was the goal of every company, why is Arai alone responsible for such comfort and fit advances as different interior shapes to fit different head shapes, removable/replaceable Cheekpads and Comfort liners to give you a more custom fit, and our latest, the Emergency Cheekpad Release System to aid injured riders?
In Arai's world, innovations don't come from a marketing department.
Every Arai helmet is virtually 100% handmade. But the obsession goes even deeper than that.
Every Arai helmet must go through three separate quality-control departments: one after the shell is made; one after painting and graphic completion; and one after assembly. This attention to detail isn't performed on every hundredth helmet, or every tenth one, but every single Arai helmet. (This kind of thing could give a profit-driven, cheaper-price helmet maker a heart attack.)
And it still goes even deeper than that: The community of Arai workers who build your helmet are so involved it's as if their family name was on the front. Their level of pride, care, and understanding of what they do - and the rider they're doing it for - is so visible you can see it in their eyes, in their concentration. They actually sign the inside of the helmet they work on. It's part of the Arai "culture," honed over those three generations. It's part of who they are, too. The Arai worker. Arai alone.
Do you think you're worth this degree of attention? Do you really think it's something you can get with just any brand?
As you might have figured by this point, an Arai helmet isn't the product of compromise or the dictates of profit-driven shareholders. There aren't different levels of quality to fit a given price. Fact is, we don't build Arai helmets to fit a price. We couldn't, not with everything we put into them. Not with everything you get out of them. This is Arai alone.
We don't build helmets to squeeze under the barest minimum of safety standards. We don't build "DOT" helmets, or "Snell" helmets. We build ARAI helmets. To us, Snell and DOT standards are baselines, not objectives. The starting point, not the goal.
We build your Arai helmet to our standards, toward the ideal of what "could" happen to you in an accident instead of simply what's "likely" to happen. As a result of this effort a typical Arai helmet easily meets the world's major motorcycle-helmet safety standards - with little or no modification.
In the end, what is your comfort and confidence worth to you?
Can you really put a "price" on them? An Arai helmet isn't inexpensive. It isn't made to be.
And when you wear one, it isn't made to feel good for just an hour or two. It's made to feel good all day, every day - and to keep feeling good for years, long after cheap helmets have become loose and shabby (and probably had to be replaced more than once).
You can't always see the reasons why an Arai feels better, but they're there: lower weight from aerospace fiberglass-based construction; a lower center of gravity for better balance and less strain; softer single-piece multiple-density liners (whose technology still hasn't been able to be copied in almost 20 years). Ventilation systems that work in the real world, not just in drawings. A helmet with no "minor" parts. And the result is major: you just feel good. You want to keep riding.
That's why we build our helmets the way we do. Because it's not about what you pay, it's about what you get.
You could go through a bunch of cheaper helmets in the lifespan of just a single 5-year-warranty Arai - and wind up spending more in the long run. Worse, you'd miss out on Arai's legendary comfort, fit, features, and feeling of confidence along the way. A helmet is something you're going to spend too much time and too many miles in to not ensure that every bit of it is a pleasure. So compromise somewhere else.
Maybe that's why someone once said that when you consider everything that goes into an Arai helmet, the price almost sounds like a bargain.
Few of us can afford to own the very best of most things. But with an Arai helmet, you truly can own the very best of something.
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