About our tests

Since this country allows child restraints to meet the criteria of 3 different international standards, we’ve compiled our test results from 3 different test programmes in Europe, the US and Australia. This is to make sure our report has test data for as many locally available models as possible. All models in our tables meet one of the 3 international standards.

These different test results are not directly comparable – so we show them in 3 separate tables.

• Most of our results are from restraints tested for us in Europe by the international consumer testing organisation ICRT. These tests use the same crash conditions as the Euro New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) tests for passenger car safety, which are more stringent than the European standard for child restraints (ECE R44.04). The test assesses front impact at 64 km/h and side impact at 50 km/h, but doesn’t include an oblique-impact test.
  
  See Tested in Europe for the ICRT test results.
• Testing of Australian child restraints is performed by the Child Restraint Evaluation Programme (CREP), which is run by a consortium of government agencies and motoring organisations. The test assesses front impact at 56 km/h, side impact at 32 km/h, and oblique impact (at a 66° angle) at 32 km/h. Its lowest rating (one star) is equivalent to passing the AS/NZS1754 standard. We have only made the top-scoring seats in the Australian tests “Worth considering” because the lower impact speeds used in the CREP test make the crash impact much less severe than the impact in the European ICRT test.
  
  See Tested in Australia for the CREP test results.
• We’ve also included restraints tested by Consumers Union US. It tests front impact at 48 km/h but doesn’t carry out a side-impact or oblique-impact test. Because the US tests don’t include side impact, we show the top-scoring US restraints but haven’t “recommended” them or made them “worth considering”.
  
  See Tested in the US for the Consumers Union test results.

Profiles of all the car seats we've recommended or rated "worth considering" are found in We recommend.