At the end of all of this, there are a few things that we know for sure. First, and most important, is that your helmet is a disposable piece of safety equipment that must be replaced after you use it. A mild crash can compress the foam even if the shell and the internal surface of the EPS look fine, and if you were to hit it in the same or similar location again, it may not do its job. Next is fit; you must have a properly (and uniformly) snug fit so that the helmet stays on your head, in position, in the event of a crash and it should be tight so that the head can't bounce inside during a violent hit. Some speculate that up to 80 percent of riders wear a helmet that is a size too big.
One more consideration you must make is price. These tests show us the price of a helmet has nothing to do with how well it will protect your head (that graphics package absorbs zero Gs), but often you can be paying for better materials, better fit and finish and for the helmet passing additional standards. No matter how much you pay, just wearing a helmet is a step in the right direction.
Our chart is a starting point (at least for those companies that chose to reveal) to see how some helmets performed comparatively. The Department of Transportation publishes the results of random sample testing it does each year at the following link: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/testing/comply/fmvss218/, and you can search out some other tests online as well but they are typically not for off-highway helmets. So you do leave a lot to trust in the standards the helmet manufacturers choose to meet. And if you don't see a helmet on our list, we have a standing offer to any helmet company that it can have this identical test performed, at its cost, at ACT Lab and we will publish the result if it chooses.
In designing a helmet and when we decide to wear one, we must be ready to draw a hypothetical line in the sand and settle on what is important to us in the form of protection and where a catastrophic force lies. Because as we expect a helmet to manage higher energy levels, it must become, in a lot of ways, stiffer and therefore may not work as well in an everyday occurrence crash hit. It is the opinion of some that a mild concussion is a fine trade for protection at higher levels if you ever need that, since the overwhelming majority of mild concussions you will fully heal from. Especially if you let them heal before you do it again! But there is also a strong push for helmets that still perform well on the smaller impacts as well as more catastrophic brain injuries. In total there is strong pressure to study the need for a dirt-oriented helmet test, to see if it is needed and if it truly will differentiate from the standards already in place. Hopefully the experts will come together and agree on something that we can all benefit from. And there are a lot of improving materials, production techniques and soon to be released concepts and designs that all strive for the same thing: safer helmets.