Think about the fact that humans have figured out how to fly to the moon and back, rebuild your heart, and create
back flipping robots. I'd say it's reasonable to think that one of the many hundred million dollar plus public ski & binding companies can develop a binding that protects your knee during a backward twisting fall.
The problem with current alpine ski bindings is they do not feel the forces applied to the binding during a backwards twisting fall, thus do not release. This is when your knee is bent and your weight is on the tail of your ski, and your ski twists or carves. Anytime your getting to far back seat, you're better off falling on your back so your skis come off the snow rather than fighting to stay up while your ski carves a turn and blows your knee.
The binding solution we developed back in early 2000's at Line was a binding named the Reactor that had a separate spring located in the heel of the binding that released laterally in a similar way as all toes currently do. It was not easy to achieve but on all ASTM tests we proved that it did indeed protect your knee far better than other bindings. We offered to license or even sell the patents to all other bindings manufacturers and no one wanted it.
People often refer to the Look Pivot as already having this knee protecting feature because the heel pivots. However that pivoting hell simply enables the TOE to rotate laterally out further before pre-releasing as well as releasing smoother. It's an awesome binding relative to others on the market... but not safer than others. The steel bars running down the side of the heel of your boot on the Pivot clearly eliminates the ability for the boot heel to actually release laterally in a backward twisting fall. The Knee binding I have not personally seen any release testing results to be able to speak about it.
The reason the Line Reactor binding did not survive is because we were a small company at the time. We could only sell a few thousand skis a year, thus not able to sell enough of these bindings to cover the immense costs of developing + manufacturing this product. The insane costs ultimately drove Line into huge debt and on the brink of bankruptcy leading to K2 acquiring it to save it from shutting down.
A large binding company like Marker, Salomon, Tyrolia, and others are the best to develop this new product. Obviously it would require millions of dollars of investment which likely has been seen as necessary.... unless customers refuse to buy current products, demanding a safer version. This won't happen until someone has the guts and $$$ to make one and successfully bring it to market so there is an alternative. A new safer binding would also immediately outdate all current bindings on the market throwing the industry into a legal liability whirlwind unable to sell the millions of bindings already on the market. However it's been done before, when the first releasable bindings were created many decades ago, prior to that time skiers broke and spiral fractured their legs when falling. We've made progress, but we're far from done when it comes to making ski bindings that perform and protect you from injury.
