One thing you can do, to see how much you can trust gear company's claim about safety, is to check if the manufacturers show the test data / result done by third party (not by the manufacturer themselves.)
Aerostich, Forcefield, Hit-Air, for example, do.
(Of course, that's not the only thing. There are products / companies that offer great protection though no third party test data available.)
On the other hand, there are tons of misleading, misguiding info floating around on the net, so people should be careful what information to pick up, what to discard.
SHARP rating system is such an example.
It's quickly spread out in the online motorcycle community. Somehow, people liked it, believing cheap lower end HIC helmet is safter than Arai or Schuberth that cost 3 times more.
A lot of people still believe SHARP 5-star rated helmet is the safest helmet on the market, some guys buy "5-star" rated helmet that doesn't fit correctly, compress EPS liner by spoon or baseball bat in order to get rid of hot spot.
Don’t blindingly trust things you read online. Including SHARP helmet rating system.
SHARP helmet rating system is NOT a god send. It is flawed, just like any other system we have in this world.
Read the PDF file linked below, before taking SHARP rating as gospel.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documen...ftheSHARPmotorcyclehelmetratingsweb600150.pdfFlaw #1
They always have the impact on the same place on the outer shell of the helmets they test. This does not take into account that different helmets sit differently on the head, meaning that the SHARP impacts are actually hitting different parts of the head (not the helmet) with different helmets.
Flaw #2
Because they always have the impact on the same place, for the manufacturer that produce cheaper helmet, it is very easy to produce a helmet that would score good in SHARP testing. (They know exactly which part of the helmet is going to be tested.)
Real high end manufacture spend time and money on R&D to develop the helmet that would protect the rider's head in the real world crush, rather than trying to get a good score at overly simplified SHARP test.
For the cheap helmet manufactures, this is a great way to advertise their product.
Flaw #3
You can read it in the PDF file above, but, in short, the SHARP test is fundamentally flawed because it utilizes a faulty model for accident mechanics, leading to an up to 300% higher chance of a deadly injury in the SHARP model compared to reality. Since they then award their stars on the basis of how many riders would die with that helmet if all riders wore it, that makes their star rating somewhat unreliable.
Flaw #4
If you live outside of UK, SHARP rating is pretty much meaningless as the test is done to the store bought helmet (in UK), therefore, the test result does not apply to the other market. (Helmet manufacturers sell different spec helmet from market to market, even if the helmet has the same model name.)
Example
A lot of people in US thought SHOEI RF-1100 was one of the safest helmet because it 5-star rated in SHARP.
The truth is, SHOEI RF-1100 is NOT 5 star rated helmet. It s XR-1100 that is tested in SHARP.
They look identical, but they are internally different. XR-1100 weigh only 1,350g, whereas RF-1100 weigh 1,746g.
RF-1100 is Snell 2010 rated, XR-1100 (both euro-market model and Japanese domestic model) is not.
The significant weight gain comes from making the helmet to pass Snell 2010.
Flaw #5
Remember how Marco Simoncelli died. (If you don't know who he was, do the goggle search.)
He was wearing AGV GP tech, which was rated 5 star in the SHARP rating system. And the helmet came off from his head because the chin strap failed.
