Consumer Reports Withdraws Troubling Infant Car Seat Report

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.

Government Caught the Error

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.

"Consumer Reports simply has not been in a position many times in its career where its integrity is being challenged in such a serious way with such a serious vulnerability," said Eric Dezenhall, CEO of Dezenhall Resources, a crisis management firm.

Dezenhall believes the magazine will now have to work to defend itself.

Consumer Reports says as soon as it found out about the problem it moved to alert consumers and withdrew the article from its Web site.

"The most important thing for us is communicating as soon as we have this information," Weine said. "The foundation of Consumer Reports is communicating openly and thoroughly with consumers. That is exactly what we are doing."

Still, the group is sticking by one of its findings. It says front crash tests showed the Evenflo Discovery car seat does not meet even minimal government standards. It wants the seat recalled.

In a statement, the company strongly denied there was anything wrong with the seat. Evenflo says after the initial magazine report the company had the seat retested 17 times -- and that it met or exceeded government standards. NHTSA, too, says its tests show the seat performs well.

This is only the second time in the 71-year history of its consumer testing that Consumer Reports has had to withdraw a report. The other was in 1998, when it acknowledged flawed testing on the nutritional content of pet food.

Consumer Reports says it does not know when it will finish its internal review or retest the car seats.

Both the magazine and the government continue to emphasize that no matter what, the safest place for a child in an automobile is strapped into a car seat.