Originally Posted by
PeteHski
Okay, so you have basically made up your mind that their test protocols are deliberately biased to favour MIPS and therefore you don’t believe any of their helmet ratings and it must all be a marketing scam. That’s fine, but I’m not that cynical.
The way I use their ratings is to simply filter out all the lower rated helmets. There are now so many 5 star rated helmets to choose from at different price points that I think it makes no sense to look at any of the lower rated ones - unless you have a better source of independent crash testing which conflicts with these ratings.
I actually don't think anything is deliberate to favor MIPS, but when MIPS came out, the test methodology wasn't updated in order to isolate and prove out the incremental benefit that MIPS claimed. On the other hand, the existing methodology they kept using is going to naturally favor MIPS. Put another way, the MIPS helmets' design is more likely to succeed in the test setups that existed. Maybe comparable, but reminds me a bit of how a number of years ago, tires got wider than their nominally specified widths, and low and behold, those tires would win the rolling resistance reviews.
Sure, I'd probably buy into the idea that on a relative basis, certainly you should pick a 5-star vs a 3-star and not be any worse off. I do note that they seemed to have upped their review volumes. They now label what you see as 2024 edition (can't find historical editions it seems?), and already have 233 models tested only 5 months into the year. That is impressive. Not sure when they dropped actually indicating the date of each test; I'd prefer to be able to see that.