What you pay for your lid is proportional to the value you place on your brain.
Not particularly true though, is it?
What do we always look for in a new helmet?
Style, lightweight, vents? All of them?
A budget (genuine) £30 helmet will pass the tests with ease, a £100 one will have been pared down to the minimum weight, feature lots of thin ribs and probably will have lost the ‘ideal’ rounded smooth shape, (like the spikey back of my Bell Sweep) until the manufacturer decides that any further may risk it not passing the testing regime.
Hopefully I’ll be shot down but you don’t seem to hear of much innovation in cycle helmets, apart from clever new retention systems so the manufacturer can reduce the number of sizes they produce.
Now if they all jumped on that cardboard helmet concept or a foam material with the same properties and managed to combine it into a lighter and more vented lid than the current commuter/pisspot version perhaps we’d be getting somewhere.