The BPA is actively involved in the development of safety standards within the industry and we support the ongoing work and investment taking place to improve upon the current UN ECE standard and the child restraint performance assessment protocol (NPACS).  A multitude of industry experts; car manufacturers, testing laboratories and motoring associations have been heavily involved.  The development process is indeed slow but deliberate and that is to make absolutely sure that any additions in both requirements and test methods are robust and repeatable.

We understand Which obtain their test results from the annual "EuroTest" commissioned by ADAC (Germany Motoring Club). We believe this test to be somewhat limited as it uses one model of car for all child seats. Not all car seats fit all cars and the seats that potentially are "the safest" are likely to be the ones that fit best in the car used.  The performance of a car seat in this test depends largely therefore on how well it fits in that particular model.

We believe NPACS is a step forward in child seat testing and whilst it may draw some elements from the ADAC tests such as the same test speed it is not "modelled closely" on them.

NPACS will not use a specific model of car instead they, like R44, will use a rig based on an "average car" which is a fundamental difference and advantage over the ADAC test.

UN ECE R44 cannot be seen as inferior to the ADAC test.  R44 uses a sled based on an "average car" crash tests from the rear and is accepted by the governments across Europe.   The ADAC test can claim none of these points.  Moreover, with R44 you can only "pass" or fail" yet ADAC is open to a good deal of interpretation and variation.

As mentioned earlier we welcome any improvement in product safety standards and believe side impact testing and NPACS to be a step forward and once proven to be robust, reproducible and unambiguous we are sure they will become part of the standards to which our members will design and build their products.

The fundamental issue our members had with the Which report is that having tested the products it labelled several products as Don't Buys. We have explained above why we are critical of those tests.

Our members took exception to the label of "Don't Buys" given that the products met the UK Legal requirements and in some instances the products were not tested in accordance with the manufacturers' instructions.

We believe it would have been fairer if it had been made clear that Which acknowledged the seats to meet legal requirements. We understand Which intend to correct this in a later edition.

We understand Which to argue that to label a product as Don't Buy is to recommend a consumer buy another product. We believe it is sufficient to label what they believe to be a better product as Best Buy but not to label products as Don't Buy. Further we believe that to label a product as Don't Buy in the context of the report was to lead the consumer to believe the product was unsafe. We consider that a product that meets the UK legal requirements should not be labelled as such.  In effect labelling a product as Don't Buy puts it into a lower category to seats that were not Best Buy's notwithstanding they all meet the legal requirements.

We are in no doubt that Which has no bias and no doubt they as a consumer association play an important role in the UK market place and we would be happy to work with them to share our knowledge and ensure their results are as meaningful and as accurate as possible.

In this regard we acknowledge the right and motives of Which to lobby that UK safety requirements are inadequate but not to unfairly test and label our members products.

Tel: 0845 456 9570
Email: info@b-p-a.org
Web: http://www.b-p-a.org/

Peter White 

Chief Executive BPA

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend

Bookmark this

---