Newlane Rated Safest Foldable Helmet
Six months ago, the head-protection researchers at Imperial College London bought some Newlane helmets. We didn’t send them and we didn’t sponsor anything. They bought them off the shelf like any customer would, and then they put them to the test.
We’ve known the team at HEAD Lab, part of Imperial’s Dyson School of Engineering, for more than four years. They set up Hiper (Helmet Impact Protection Effectiveness Rating) to give cyclists an evidence-based way to compare how well bike helmets actually protect them on UK roads.
We were flattered to be included, and if we’re honest, a little nervous. The Newlane folds flat and has only been on sale since 2024. Most of the other helmets in this round were non-folding models from some of the biggest names in sports protection.
How HIPER tests
Every helmet sold in the UK has to pass a safety standard, but that’s a pass/fail test. Hiper asks a harder question: once a helmet has passed, how well does it really protect your head?
To answer that, Hiper recreates the way cyclists actually crash. Nobody falls in a straight line, so helmets are dropped onto an angled surface. Impacts like these make the head rotate, and rotation is closely linked to traumatic brain injury. The tests use a state-of-the-art biofidelic headform, built to behave much more like a real human head than a standard one.
Each helmet is tested at four impact points: front, rear, side and front-side. It then gets a protection score out of 100 and a medal from Bronze up to Diamond.
The results
Newlane x Mips: Platinum, 82.3/100, second out of 30
Our Mips-equipped helmet was awarded Hiper Platinum and finished ahead of every other helmet tested except one. It folds flat to fit in a bag and still outperformed almost every conventional helmet on the list.
This is the result that matters most to us. Hiper’s tests are built around rotation, and reducing rotation is exactly what Mips was designed to do. Put to Imperial’s toughest test, the combination of Newlane’s folding design and Mips came out near the very top.
Newlane Original: Silver, 71.9/100
Our standard helmet finished firmly mid-table, a respectable score for a helmet built to fold. Adding Mips raised the score by more than ten points and lifted it from Silver to Platinum.
What this means
When we started Newlane, the question we heard most was: “Can a helmet that folds really be as safe as one that doesn’t?”
Now there’s an independent answer, from one of the world’s leading engineering universities, based on helmets it bought itself. A folding helmet can do more than match the big brands. It can beat them.
We’ve always believed the safest helmet is the one you actually have with you. A helmet that folds into your bag gets taken on the hire bike, the e-scooter and the spontaneous ride home. A helmet left in the hallway does nothing. With these results you no longer have to choose between convenient and protective.
The Newlane x Mips is available now.
