User:Dexterford

Dexter Ford—Journalist

Dexter Ford is a California-based writer and journalist specializing in motorcycles, automobiles, electric motorcycles and cars, solar and other sustainable energy sources, adventure travel and contemporary architecture.

Ford currently writes for the New York Times on automotive and motorcycle topics, for the Los Angeles Times on sustainable architecture, and for various other motorcycle, automotive and general-interest publications. He has written for Motor Trend, Automobile Magazine, Cycle Magazine, Dirt Bike Magazine, Dirt Rider Magazine, Motocross Action and many other enthusiast publications.

Ford’s writing is characterized by a wry sense of humor and a deep sense of the outrageous. One former Motorcyclist staffer, Jeff Karr, likened Ford’s prose style in the 1980s to “riding in sand with the throttle pinned. He doesn’t always know where he is headed, but he seems to get there just the same.”

Early Motorcycle Journalism

Originally from Simsbury, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford, Ford started racing amateur motocross in local competition in 1973. While majoring in Journalism and Photojournalism at Boston University, he started contributing to motorcycle and motorcycle-racing publications, including New England Cycle Sport Magazine and Dirt Bike Magazine. He went to work for High Torque Publications, the publisher of Dirt Bike and Motocross Action magazines, directly after college.

Ford and Motorcyclist Magazine

Ford is best known for his 30-year association with Motorcyclist Magazine, a American publication that is the oldest continually published motorcycle magazine in the world, having started publication in 1912.

Ford wrote his first article for Motorcyclist in 1979, a behind-the-scenes account of young racer Mike Baldwin’s efforts at the 1979 Daytona 200 motorcycle road race. He was hired by Motorcyclist editor Art Friedman as Feature Editor in 1981, and left the staff as Executive Editor in 1990.

In early 1990 Ford started amateur motorcycle road racing while researching a story on the then-popular Harley-Davidson Sportster Twin- Sports Racing class. He managed to win a Novice race at Willow Springs on fellow Motorcyclist staffer Nick Ienatsch’s Yamaha FZR600 race bike, and then placed fourth in the Willow Springs AMA National Twin Sports race that year.

He continued writing for the magazine as Editor at Extra Large, the title a reference to his then-abundant girth, continuing to contribute motorcycle road tests, comparison tests, features, and a column entitled “Who Knew?”.

Cars vs. Motorcycles

He wrote two often-cited articles that compared the performance of the fastest available production automobiles against the fastest 1000cc sport bikes, once in 1990 and again in 2002. In both cases the motorcycles (a Yamaha FZR1000 and a Suzuki GSX-R1000) far outpaced the autos (a Corvette ZR-1 and a Corvette Z06) in lap times around Willow Springs Raceway, and in 1/4-mile acceleration and braking tests.

Travel on 2 wheels

Ford’s work is also characterized by thought-provoking motorcycle-travel articles, to places which include the Soviet Union, North Africa, China, The Alps, Chile and Argentina, and Tuscany.

The Helmet Standards Controversy

Ford is best-known for an extensive 2005 Motorcyclist article, “Blowing The Lid Off”, which covered a debate in the motorcycle-helmet industry between virtually all head-injury and helmet-design scientists in the field, and the Snell Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit which had been formulating helmet standards, performing helmet testing and certifying helmets to its own standards for decades.

Ford and Motorcyclist, in cooperation with scientist David Thom’s Collision and Injury Dynamics helmet-testing lab in El Segundo, California, performed an extensive series of real-world impact tests on a variety of production full-face street-motorcycle helmets.

The results of the testing showed that expensive, Snell-certified Arai helmets tested allowed as much as 67 extra gs of brain-injuring force to be transmitted to the instrumented head-forms inside the helmets during impact testing, compared with helmets certified to the mandatory U.S. DOT and the European ECE 22-05 standards.

According to some generally accepted head-injury guidelines, that 67 extra gs equated to more than one added level on the AIS six-level trauma-injury scale: for example, from a “severe” head injury to a “critical” head injury. Or from a “critical” head injury to a “non-survivable” one.

Cheaper DOT helmets outperform Snell-certified Arai and Shoei helmets.

The best-performing helmet in the test was an inexpensive helmet made in China by HJC, a major Korean-based helmet manufacturer, and marketed in the U. S. as the Z1-R “Strike”. Its retail price was $79.95. Other helmets in the test had retail prices as high as $700.

After the inexpensive, DOT-only helmets outperformed their more-expensive Snell-rated competition, Ford and Dave Thom subjected the winning DOT-only helmets to the toughest impacts Thom’s equipment allowed—impact tests far more violent than any single tests used in Snell or any other certification scheme.

Even in these ultra-violent impacts the DOT-rated helmets showed no signs of failure, and still transferred far less brain-damaging force to the artificial heads than more-expensive Snell-certified helmets from Arai and other manufacturers did in far less-violent impact tests.

The Snell Memorial Foundation responded to the resulting story with attacks on Ford, Motorcyclist and the scientists quoted in the article. Arai and Shoei canceled advertising commitments with Motorcyclist in retribution for the article, in effect punishing Motorcyclist for finding and telling the truth about vital, life-saving safety equipment.

This brought up serious ethical questions on the behavior of the Japanese helmet manufacturers Arai and Shoei. Their efforts to suppress real-world testing results, and the opinions of many reputable scientists in the field, cast doubt as to the ethical standards and trustworthiness of both Arai and Shoei.

Ford dismissed from Motorcyclist after helmet-company threats

In September, 2010, Ford wrote an article for The New York Times on the introduction of the Snell M2010 standard and some background about the helmet-standards debate. This new M2010 Snell testing regime answered some of the criticisms raised by Ford and helmet-design scientists in the 2005 Motorcyclist story, making it possible, according to Snell, for manufacturers to build helmets that pass both the new Snell M2010 standard and the mandatory (in Europe) ECE 22-05 standard.

The New York Times piece reiterated the views of scientists in the field that the previous Snell standard, M2005, resulted in helmets that were excessively rigid and unyielding, likely causing unnecessary brain injuries in the most-common motorcycle, dirt bike and ATV accidents, especially among smaller-headed women, teenagers and children.

The article noted that Snell was still allowing manufacturers to make helmets to the now-superseded M2005 standard—the standard that dictated the ultra-rigid helmets that did so poorly in the Motorcyclist testing—until March 2012. And to sell them forever.

Arai and Shoei reacted to the New York Times story by again threatening Motorcyclist with a boycott of their advertising, according to emails from Motorcyclist Editor Brian Catterson—even though the article did not mention Arai or Shoei. Brian Catterson’s emails clearly show that Arai and Shoei had threatened serious financial retribution against Motorcyclist as a result of Ford’s admittedly accurate New York Times article, on what Catterson himself called “the dangers of Snell M2005 helmets”.

Ford was then informed that, after 30 years of writing for and representing Motorcyclist, his association with the magazine was to be severed.