Consumer Reports Withdraws Infant Safety Seat Report

Talk about having egg on your face… After making a huge splash with their study on infant safety seats, Consumer Reports has just withdrawn their report. According to Consumer Reports:

We withdrew the report immediately upon discovering a substantive issue that may have affected the original test results. The issue came to light based on new information received Tuesday night and Wednesday morning from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concerning the speed at which our side-impact tests were conducted.

For their part, the NHTSA is “fairly certain that the crash speed [at which] Consumer Reports conducted the tests was really closer to 70 to 80-miles per hour.” If this is true, it means that the side-impact tests were carried out at roughly twice the intended speed.

Interestingly, Consumer Reports is still standing by its front-impact results, which it insists were performed at the intended speed. Given this, it seems that there are still some pretty severe problems with infant safety seats in this country, although they may not be as bad as originally believed. Consumer Reports intends to repeat the tests re-issue their report as soon as possible.

[Source: ABC News]