Saturday 21 July 2007

Manufacturers giving security ratings to their own products.

This one has always amused me no end, first time I saw it was on a (admittedly very good) Abus Granit 59 D lock, scored 25 out of 25 on the Abus scale of 25, nice to see confidence in a great product.

What I'd really like to know, is why any manufacturer would actually make anything less than their own maximum rating. I mean the Kryptonite 3000 D lock scores 11 out of 12 (1 being something mainly to fend off bear attack, 7-8 for giving those pesky ginger kids across the road a hard time, and 12 to make sure some 9mm toting gangstah puts a cap in yo ass before he gets your bike). Why make something 11? Why not 12? What's the point in going all the way to 11, then admitting that it's not quite as you thought it would be, so you dropped a point OFF YOUR OWN PRODUCT! It's always struck me as a battle between chronic lack of faith and chronic narcissism, a war to look both humble and strong at the same time. Look at the amount of test authority stickers on "high end" Kryptonite stuff, surely a bazillion test authorities findings must be a sound enough basis on which the public can judge your product? so why bother inventing your own sliding scale of crap<..................ok...............>very reasonable ?

Who knows. I rate this blog post 12 out of 25 on the Captain Cropper Sliding scale of blog post interest.

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