Bike helmets: let's compare US vs Canadian prices

A leading US consumer magazine has just published a review of bicycle helmets.

The magazine is picky about anyone reprinting their test results, so we are discussing here only the retail prices of the helmets they tested, which is publicly available information. 

And we are doing this because inside the Canadian edition of the magazine are the Canadian retail prices for the products the test.  This is in itself often very interesting.

So let's take a look at how US and Canadian prices compare, shall we?

Living in Canada means getting ripped off most of the time.
But not all of the time.

So we conclude that Canadian company Garneau (aka Louis Garneau) didn't rip off Canadians. Some sort of prize should be awarded to Garneau!

Bontrager has one model with the same price in both US and Canada, and another model with the smallest price difference compared to other brands. The rest of the companies treat us like suckers.  

We need a new helmet, (it is strongly recommended that you should replace your helmet every five years or after any sort of bouncy incident - with or without your head actually inside the helmet) and this comparison is food for thought.

You can read the full report to see their testing results of the protection bike helmets actually provide, and a discussion on whether the existing government testing standards actually provide enough protection, in the July 2012 edition of Consumer reports.

Helmets save lives, that is a fact. But they do not provide limitless or magical protection, and the level of protection decreases as your speed increases.