I Cannot Recall Consumer Reports Having to Recall their Own Recall

A while back Dubner blogged about how Consumer Reports had demanded a recall of a number of rear-facing child seats because they performed so poorly in their tests.

Now Consumer Reports has a recall of their own. Apparently they may have done some of the tests wrong. We will have to wait and see what their revised study finds.

A recommendation I have to Consumer Reports, or anyone else with easy access to crash tests: don’t just run comparisons of different brands of car seats, also compare how the car seats do to adult seat belts. Both the data from real-world crashes I have looked at and a very limited crash-test that Dubner and I ran suggest that adult seat belts will do pretty well, although virtually every public official and public health expert is completely confident that adult seat belts will fail miserably. I cannot understand why this sort of study is not commonplace.

(This particular Consumer Reports analysis is for infant seats, so adult seat belts are not really viable…it would have to be a comparison of safety seats for older kids to adult seat belts.)