Obsolete Product Review: Scorpion EXO R410 Helmet

I’ve been riding with a Scorpion EXO R410 helmet for about three years now, so I suppose it’s time for a new one.  I tried to get the latest cost for my helmet on the Scorpion website, but they’re up to the EX0 420 series now, and mine is obsolete.

This is my second Scorpion helmet.  My prior (and first) Scorpion helmet saved my life when I crashed my Triumph Speed Triple back in ’09.  I’m very grateful for that (I literally landed on the top of my head, and the top of that earlier helmet looked like a hardboiled egg that had been whacked against a counter top).   But, truth be told, I’m not all that wild about my current Scorpion.

First, the good stuff.  It’s a one-piece full face helmet, the price was reasonable, and it’s all one color (and that’s the color I like, fluorescent green).  When I bought this helmet it was difficult to find one that was all fluorescent green (and I noticed on today’s Scorpion website that they don’t offer this color as a solid color any more).   When I bought my current Scorpion three years ago, other helmets from other manufacturers had weird color combos consisting of different combinations of fluorescent green and flat black.  I didn’t care for that look. There were modular helmets in solid fluorescent green (you know, the kind that have a flip up lower section), but I don’t like that concept, either.  Weird things happen in a crash, and I could visualize that modular part heading south when impacting the pavement.   Nope, I wanted a solid safety green full face helmet, and Scorpion was the only one out there.

More good stuff:  The helmet fits snugly and it keeps me warm.  That’s important.  And it’s not too heavy (it doesn’t become onerous at the end of  a long day).  And one more:  The helmet was reasonably priced.  As I recall, it was something around $200 and change.  I paid a little less because I work in the industry.   Come to think of it, if I had worked the problem, I probably could have talked Scorpion into giving me one for free if I had featured it on the blog, but I didn’t do that.  The bottom line:  The Scorpion’s price is reasonable.

Okay, on to the bad stuff.  I wear eyeglasses, and sometimes I wear contacts.  Contacts are the way to go if you wear a full face helmet because they make pulling the helmet on and off a lot easier.  But a lot of times I wear my glasses and putting them on while wearing this helmet is a real pain in the ass.  The temples just don’t want to sneak in between the helmet liner and my ears, and it usually takes me several tries to put my glasses on once I’ve got the helmet on.  I guess you could say I make a spectacle of myself every time I put my helmet on.  (I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist sneaking that in.  You know, making a spectacle of myself.  Get it?  Eyeglasses?  Making a spectacle of myself, like the time the optometrist fell into his lens grinding machine?)

My next complaint:  The faceshield has some kind of film on the inside that can’t make up its mind about staying there or peeling off, and it seems to be doing both right in my line of sight.  I’ve tried scrubbing it with Windex, water, alcohol, and all kinds of other stuff.  It’s a weird one; I’ve never seen any other faceshield behave similarly.  I could just buy a replacement, but hey, it might do the same thing.  You’d think somebody at Scorpion would know about this and they would have fixed it before the faceshields got out of the factory.   Maybe they already have on the newer ones.

Another complaint, although it’s not really fair to single out Scorpion for this:  The vents don’t seem to do anything. Open or closed makes no difference in airflow around my noggin, nor do they make any difference in how cool or warm I am inside the helmet.  The vents don’t make any difference in the faceshield’s propensity to fog, either.  But, like I said, all of my helmets have been like this.  As far as I’m concerned, the manufacturers could leave these vent arrangements off altogether and sell the helmet for less.

When I need air flowing in my helmet, or if the faceshield is fogging, I just open the faceshield a scosh, and that brings me to my next complaint:  You can’t do that on the Scorpion.

There’s no interim notch that allows the faceshield to crack open the quarter inch or so that my other helmets have always been able to do.  There are plenty of notches for interim faceshield positions; they’re just poorly conceived and they’re all way too high.  The first one after the full faceshield down position puts the bottom edge of the faceshield right in my line of sight.  If you look above that edge, the angle through the faceshield is severe and everything is distorted. If you look below it, you have to tilt your head at an odd angle and you get no protection from the faceshield.  The five upper positions are such that you might as well completely open the faceshield.   Whoever designed the positions probably doesn’t ride.

So there you have it.  I’ve read that you’re supposed to replace your helmet every three years, so I guess I’m about due.   The good thing for me about writing this blog is it firms up (for me) what I need to evaluate when considering my next helmet.  The above negatives notwithstanding, I’m going to give Scorpion another shot. I owe them, big time, based on the performance of my first Scorpion helmet.  It did its job.