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The market will decide the value of these ratings. If people start buying 5 star helmets over other lesser ratings then helmet manufacturers will start to design their helmets to pass the test.
Thats fine if the test is valid and genuinely reflects conditions in a real world impact. If not then helmets design could be progressed in the wrong direction.
I would like to see the SHARP testing as a starting point, and hopefully they will develop the testing over time, given enough funding etc. This is what happened with NCAP in my industry, and I believe that NCAP testing forced the manufacturers to really design their cars for real world crashes rather than to pass a given set of legislation.
One word about the poor ratings for Shoei and Arai, both of these companies have enormous R+D budgets (as well as enormous marketing budgets) and I don't think there are many companies / groups that know more about head protection than them, so I personally would not place too much emphasis at this time on the SHARP test results. I think they need more development yet to replicate real world.
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