About 315 Basecamp-brand bicycle helmets sold on Amazon.com have been recalled after testing found they fail the federal safety standard required of every bike helmet sold in the United States. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says the HT-10 model, sold in green and black for about $34, does not adequately protect a rider’s head in a crash. The agency is telling anyone who owns one to stop riding in it immediately. Tongyang Cycling, the Chinese company that sold the helmets, is offering buyers a full refund.
The recall is small in absolute numbers, but it fits a pattern CPSC has flagged repeatedly among helmets sold directly through Amazon’s marketplace by little-known overseas brands, where a listing can rack up two years of sales before a lab test catches a shell that never should have been certified.
Failed impact and stability testing
The recalled helmets are model HT-10, sold in green and black in a medium/large size built to fit head circumferences from 22.44 to 24.41 inches, with red interior padding, black-and-red straps, a buckle and a fit-adjusting knob. CPSC’s finding is blunt: the helmets “do not comply with the impact attenuation, positional stability and certification requirements” set for every bicycle helmet sold in the country.
That standard, known as 16 CFR 1203, requires helmets to survive drop tests onto flat, hemispherical and curbstone-shaped anvils without transmitting more than 300 g’s of peak acceleration to a test headform, keep a rider’s peripheral vision at 105 degrees on each side, and stop straps from stretching more than 1.2 inches under load. Basecamp’s helmets failed enough of that testing regimen that CPSC ordered the recall on September 17, 2026, filed as case number 26-785.
A battery warning label also missing
The recall lists a second, unrelated violation: the helmet’s button cell battery does not bear the warning labels required by Reese’s Law, the federal law that mandates secured compartments and ingestion warnings on any consumer product containing a button or coin battery. CPSC’s own guidance on the law requires those warnings to appear on the product itself, its packaging and its instructions, because a swallowed button battery can burn through a child’s esophagus within hours if it lodges there.
Sold on Amazon for two years, no incidents reported
Tongyang sold the helmets exclusively through Amazon.com from July 2024 through July 2026, a two-year run that ended only when the recall closed it out. CPSC logged no injuries tied to the helmets before ordering it.
Consumers are told to stop using the helmet immediately and contact Tongyang Cycling for a refund. The company is then asking buyers to cut the straps, photograph the destroyed helmet, email the image to confirm destruction, and dispose of the battery through local hazardous-waste channels rather than a regular trash bin. A helmet’s certification label, required under the same 16 CFR 1203 rule, is supposed to carry a production lot number and manufacture date so a recall like this one can be matched to a specific batch rather than an entire product line.
Not the first Amazon-only helmet to fail
Basecamp is not the only overseas helmet brand CPSC has pulled from Amazon in the past two years. In January 2025, the agency recalled about 684 NQDTPBOR-brand helmets sold exclusively on Amazon.com for roughly $23, citing the same combination of positional-stability, impact and certification failures. In February 2026, it went further still, recalling roughly 40,245 Concord-branded light-up helmets sold at Walmart after finding they failed the same standard’s retention-system and positional-stability requirements, a batch more than 100 times the size of the Basecamp recall.
The battery portion of the Basecamp recall traces back to a different kind of case entirely. Reese’s Law is named for Reese Hamsmith, an 18-month-old girl who died in 2020, 47 days after swallowing a button battery from a TV remote. Her mother, Trista Hamsmith, said the ease of access to those batteries “made me angry” and spent the next two years pushing Congress to require child-resistant battery compartments and ingestion warnings before President Biden signed the bill into law in August 2022. That the same recall notice cites both a failed helmet-safety test and a missing Reese’s Law warning suggests the manufacturer treated federal labeling as an afterthought on two separate fronts at once.
CPSC’s own consumer guidance on choosing a helmet tells buyers to check for a certification sticker inside the shell before every ride, since a helmet that never met that certification in the first place is exactly the failure both 2026 recalls describe. CPSC has not published a return count for the 315 Basecamp helmets since the recall opened, the same silence that followed its count of 684 NQDTPBOR helmets pulled from Amazon back in January 2025 for nearly identical impact and certification failures.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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