Yeah, I saw that, but the rating on textiles, even if AA or AAA rated just doesn't ring true to me as a reliable "safety" rating, more a comparator index for abrasion resistance. The impact resistance of ghost armour for example takes some convincing as it's incredibly thin (at least my Klim stuff is). The best armour I have is in my Rukka Pathfinder jacket, like all Rukka products, they don't skimp on coverage. Interesting looking at the MCap site and also the Shark ratings. I'd trust these more than just a dumbed down new CE level ratings. The old level 1/level 2 ratings were imho far more reliable but hard to decipher what was included as it was left up to manufacturers. For example, my Marakesh trousers at AA rating wouldn't have met the level 1 of the old standard, or would barely make it even using ghost level 2 armour. AAA ratings are now anything up to 70% less than the old level 2 standard. The whole CE ratings I now find as wholly unreliable indicators, their only advantage being far more specific indicators of abrasion. MCap/Shark are what I look at for new kit if doing comparisons.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist though to simply pick decent armoured leathers if you want the best levels of protection. I think we all tend to get a bit complacent when it comes to textiles.
The problem with the new CE ratings is that it's only a pass or fail and manufacturers can choose which rating to test to. So if a specific item is AA rated, you won't know if it barely meets AA minimum requirements, exceeds it by a fair margin, or even could exceed AAA minimum requirements. Because the manufacturer might have not tested it to AAA because they didn't bother, didn't want to pay more for more testing or didn't think it would pass AAA anyway. Or even maybe they thought it would pass, but they intentionally did not test it for AAA because they wanted to reserve that rating for their top-end garment to push buyers to buy the more expensive option. It could also be the case they did test to AAA but it failed, they don't have to disclose that. And the AA test only indicated that it passed, not by how much because of how the test works.
As a comparator with MotoCAP, you can check out the number of seconds of abrasion time in the test reports. For high risk zones old level 1 standard was 4 seconds minimum, level 2 was 7 seconds. These cannot be directly compared to any number of seconds of the new CE test. However, MotoCAP has tested quite a few CE rated garments, so they can indicate what the lowest results are, in order to indicate a comparative with the minimum requirements of a CE rating. For AAA high risk zones, that used to be 1.3 to 1.7 seconds on the MotoCAP and old standard. However, now that more and more AAA garments (a lot of them jeans) are released, manufacturers are discovering better the minimum protection required to achieve AAA. Now there are AAA garments that only achieve 1.0 seconds in high risk zones on the MotoCAP test. So that's 7 times lower than the old level 2, not 70%.. (Not to mention the old standard high risk zones are also much larger, so in those extended zones the difference is even larger as it compared to the Medium risk zones of the new CE standard.)
For AA high risk zones, the minimum requirements can be compared to 0.6 seconds in MotoCAP testing. (These numbers come directly from Dr Chris Hurren from MotoCAP, he did a recent in depth
interview on Youtube and sometimes post comments on Youtube as well. Very interesting interview to watch.)
There's also AA rated textile garments on MotoCAP that score 2-4 seconds, so the CE ratings are kinda useless as indicators of abrasion resistance as well.
I agree that the CE ratings are incomplete as a safety rating, but higher ratings do also have higher requirements for tear strength and seam strength compared to lower ratings. So it's not just about abrasion resistance. I've read a few comments about people working in the gear industry that the AAA seam strength test is quite hard and garments can also fail an AAA rating on seam strength alone even though abrasion resistance is good enough to pass.
