Consumer Reports Withdraws Troubling Infant Car Seat Report

Magazine said seats failed tests and plans internal review for flawed results.

ByABC News
January 18, 2007, 8:29 PM

Jan. 18, 2007 — -- In a dramatic turnabout, Consumer Reports says it is withdrawing its recent report on infant car seats.

The current issue of the magazine includes a troubling report that questions the safety of some of the most well-known seats on the market -- including those made by Graco, Peg Perego, Evenflo, Britex and Combi.

The organization tested 12 car seats in front and side crashes and reported that nine of them failed. The magazine said the seats twisted violently, flew off their bases and hurled a test dummy 30 feet across a lab.

But now the venerable consumer testing organization says it messed up. The side crash tests were apparently not conducted at the speeds the magazine indicated. Instead of simulating a side crash at 38-miles an hour, the speeds may have exceeded 70-miles an hour.

Consumer Reports' senior director of communications Ken Weine said, "In light of that we decided to conduct new tests to look at all aspects of the article and to conduct an internal review on the process that created this article."

Weine said the testing was done by an outside lab and he could not say how much oversight Consumer Reports had exercised.

The mistake came to light after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, worried about the magazine's results, decided to run its own tests.

The NHTSA found the car seats remained intact throughout the collisions.

"Not a single seat separated from the base, and all the dummies were secure in the seat," said Nicole Nason, an administrator at the NHTSA. "We're fairly certain that the crash speed [at which] Consumer Reports conducted the tests was really closer to 70 to 80-miles per hour."

When its findings were published, Consumer Reports, a trusted source of consumer information for more than 70 years, had parents unnerved.

"We know that there was a general panic on that first day, because we received over a hundred calls to our hotline from parents who said they didn't know what to do now that they've seen this report," Nason said.