I've bought helmets from overseas and locally aswell, had a $30 avanti helmet from a LBS that 'met AU' standards and cracked from a small fall (like maybe 1m or less onto back & head, big crack in the back of it) and an overseas protec helmet that didn't 'meet AU' standards but saved me multiple times without breaking, whacking my head hard on a vert ramp when i used to blade, so go figure.
As for all the 'insurance' stuff, i'd like to know what insurance companies just throw in cover for what is considered an 'extreme' sport
. I mean you need an expensive custom policy just to cover your bike the second you take it out of your garage, let alone off road. Then your 3rd party is usually covered with your club membership. As for medical, if you have private health insurance that will cover your hospital stay regardless of how you get there and if you don't, there's always that other thing called the public healthcare system. The only thing left is the ambulance, Sure you may have to pay the ambulance bill, but then again if you're doing a sport where you go out of the way to wear things like knee pads and helmets, then you should also spend the
huge sum of $37.50 annually in vic anyway to cover that rather than risking a huge bill should you end up wrecking yourself. And should you have income & life insurance, you'll find that a large majority of those policies cover 'just about' everything. Not to mention I'd like to see the insurance company that is bold enough to risk the potential brand damage for disputing a claim for someone who wore a helmet, even if it was on the road, which to me reads like 'On Today Tonight, The insurance company that denied the claim of a cyclist who wore a helmet". Besides, with any luck our 'compulsory' helmet laws will get scrapped soon enough, seeing as obesity & congestion are going to only get worse, someone is eventually going to make the smart decision to stop mandatory helmets to help kick-start a bike share scheme. Once that happens this whole thing will be moot.
Now this is all IMO, but I would think that provided you are wearing a helmet, one that may not meet standards here but does overseas, you will be less likely to wreck yourself to the point of needing insurance or hospitalization in the first place. I mean if the difference in cost from buying overseas means using a full face helmet instead of a dirt lid for example, should you fall off you now have
more protection than if you weren't wearing a full face which you may not have been able to afford with the sometimes insane or sometimes totally reasonable LBS mark-up. The other thing is if you can get the helmet cheaper, that means when you do break it, crack it, whatever, you can treat it for the product that it is, a throwaway consumable and buy another one rather than ride around with a cracked helmet which would be something that an insurance company would be more likely to deny a claim on IMO. I mean a 661 comp of CRC is like $85, but my LBS expects me to pay $160 for one. I can get
two helmets imported and delivered for $10 more than buying one locally.
Personally this whole thing is just desperate scaremongering, under the guise of 'protecting AU jobs', which is more like 'protect our outdated business models and insane mark-ups'. Last time I checked we're a capitalist country, and if you can't compete you die off, plain and simple. If i can get the same exact product, and have it get sent to the UK, packaged up, then mailed
halfway around the world to my door for almost half the price of what my LBS can do, then my LBS doesn't deserve my business. They can whine and complain and blame the distributor, but they're not doing their duty as merchants, as business owners to earn my business. I would happily pay 10% more to get it today from a LBS as opposed to waiting 2 weeks for the courier who knows me by name now to deliver my CRC boxes, pretty much everyone I know who rides would, and with that little difference, the shops could grey import themselves, make more money, and with that 10% difference you could cover the freight back to wherever to handle what few warranty claims happen. If enough LBS's did this and stopped being
dependent on their distributors, you would see the distributor's become very reasonable & competitive with their pricing very quickly. After all, the LBS only exists to serve me, the consumer, I have no 'duty' to keep them in business, they have the duty to win my business or flounder. Not to mention that the distributors could also lobby to get the standards changed so that they don't have to be smashing helmets from every single batch, which would lower their costs and allow then to compete with say CRC, but instead they put their energy and funds into scary advertising where they are using
fear to intimidate me as a consumer, and then they expect me to support this behaviour with my wallet? Just no.
