Riding Safety Promotion Activities

Helping Our Customers Become Safer Riders

Riders attend classes to learn riding skills

Lecture on riding safety

Motorcycle simulator that allows students to experience various situations without risk

In order to more actively promote motorcycle riding safety, the Yamaha Motor group has been conducting its Yamaha Riding Academy (YRA) courses in locations all around the world. The YRA curriculum integrates and systematizes the following three programs: the Safety Promotion Program, the Motorsports Promotion Program, and the Product Promotion Program. Our activities for the promotion of riding safety are based on curricula developed to reflect the social, transportation, and user requirements of each specific region.
Our initiatives focus on Yamaha motorcycles but also include the product areas of ATVs(all-terrain vehicles), PWCs (personal watercraft) and snowmobiles. We are promoting such initiatives particularly in rapidly growing markets, such as those in the ASEAN countries, Central and South America, the Middle East, Russia, and Africa, where the lack of riding safety instruction and rider awareness education has become an acute social problem.
Thai Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. (TYM) has a permanent training facility that constantly runs training courses to teach riding and safety skills. The facility has a large meeting room, lecture rooms, and a motorcycle riding simulator room. In Thailand, motorcycle accidents are a significant social problem, and TYM has been working to promote motorcycle riding safety there for years. Since 2005 it has been offering 50 to 70 riding safety seminars per year throughout Thailand in cooperation with Thailand's Ministry of Transport and Communication. As a government-accredited official testing site, TYM also issues motorcycle-riding certificates (the document needed to obtain a license). This facility is utilized to improve our customers' riding safety skills and to train instructors, targeting dealers in the ASEAN region.

Enhancing Awareness and Recognition of Safety through Scientific Understanding

The curriculum includes Q & A and discussion sessions with students.

The concepts students learn in morning lectures are put into practice during practical classes in the afternoon of the same day.

The Yamaha Motor group not only promotes greater road safety through practical courses but also promotes greater awareness of the issue through enhancement of knowledge. The "Yamaha Safe Riding Science (YSRS)" course is run for the benefit of young people in collaboration with public authorities and educational institutions of various countries. It aims to educate people on the physical forces of inertia, friction, and impulse, as well as kinetic energy associated with riding two-wheeled vehicles, from a scientific perspective. Instructors use specially prepared movies to analyze, explain and give students hands-on experience in learning the scientific importance of consciousness and proper recognition of, judgment of and response to predictable dangers.
These efforts are founded on survey results indicating that students show greater interest in and understanding toward courses based on scientific theories. Instructors are dispatched from Japan along with basic educational materials, and we promote the spread of safe riding by customizing the curriculum to suit the local social and traffic conditions in collaboration with local corporations. These efforts have so far been concentrated mainly in Southeast Asia, but they have also gotten under way in India, and Central and South America, where the market has expanded rapidly and is creating social issues regarding awareness of traffic safety and manners.

Riding Courses Held for Police Officers and People of Other Public Organizations

The Yamaha Motor group is involved in teaching safe riding skills to police officers and people of other public organizations, which is indispensable in the effort to promote riding safety throughout society. This is another part of our YRA activities, in which instructors are dispatched from Japan to engage in ongoing activities to promote safety through specialized curricula in product areas including two-wheeled vehicles, PWCs and ATVs.

Photos of courses run in Argentina and Senegal (photos from 2009)

Spread of Safe Piloting of Industrial-use Unmanned Helicopters

We hold workshops every year domestically and abroad to promote the safe piloting of industrial-use unmanned helicopters. In June 2010, we held "2010 Safe Piloting Workshops" in four regions around the Republic of Korea just prior to the agriculture industry's crop dusting season. Instructors from Yamaha Motor took part in the events to demonstrate proper piloting skills and instruct participants, thus succeeding in enhancing both the skills and awareness of people at the event.