This is a great video that everyone should watch.

But part of the problem with the 50 y/o car may be that the steel has rusted (based on the rust-colored cloud of particles). That may be why the older car just disintegrates.

OTOH the weakening of the steel because of rust creates a de-facto "crumple zone"? A minor improvement? :)

Older cars were much too rigid and the body didn't absorb much energy. It was all transmitted to the occupants.

Also, forgetting about design improvements in safety, I'm not sure I want to "bet my life" on 50 year old brake lines, etc. That sort of stuff just wears out.

The nice thing about those cars is that you can actually replace things like suspension and brake systems with modern equivalents relatively easily. It’s not like swapping in an F-150 brake system into a Corolla.

As far as rust, I’m sure you can find some rust free cars in AZ or CA.

God I hate that video so much. It is right up there with the Top Gear Hilux episode when it comes to entertainment being peddled as scientific experiment by people who find it convenient to the point they are trying to make to do so (not saying you did that, just that tons of people do). It was a promotional video designed to highlight progress. It does that just fine. But every two bit tom dick and harry seems to think it's representative of a crash between any old car and any new car when the vehicle in the video doesn't even have seat-belts (!!!!) which are the single biggest improvement to crash safety/survivability ever.

There's a reason nobody is going to do a crash test of a 1980s Ford cop car into a 2010s Ford cop car. It would be a massive nothingburger.

Frontal airbags do little for seatbelted passengers at crash test speeds (texting into the back of a semi at 70mph is a different story). In fact in many cases they are worse than no airbag at low/medium speeds because you injure your face hitting airbag or are injured in its deployment in situations where you would have otherwise hit nothing. They are intended as damage control for unbelted passengers (which is where do you think the first S in SRS comes from).

Crumple zones are highly overrated. Imagine an old cartoon where someone gets thrown off a building and happens to land on a guy carrying mattresses. That's basically how crumple zones work. Too high of a jump or too soft of a mattress and you blow right through with negligible deceleration. Too hard of a mattress and the mattress decelerates you basically as hard a the sidewalk. Crumple zones provide time for the airbag to deploy, yes but they only really mitigate the forces on the passenger cabin (and its occupants) at a narrow speed range (they shoot for the speed of the relevant crash tests).

For people who were doing things right and wearing their seatbelt the safety of crashing a car changed negligibly from the advent of the 3pt belt to the time of the side curtain airbag. (I'm ignoring rollover safety here, that's been a basically linear improvement since the 1960s but it's not technically interesting because it's a simple case of throwing more and more steel at the problem)

Side curtain airbags have been a major improvement because there's not much restraint nor space for deceleration in that direction. They do a great job keeping people's heads from hitting stuff.

AEB is another good modern one. Knocking 5-20mph off the speed of a collision helps a lot no matter how you cut it.

All that said, everyone who worships safety tech uncritically as though they're all big improvements you can stack on top of each other and get the sum of them all needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Professing your love for airbags and crumple zones might get you fake internet points on Reddit or HN but that's just not how it works and those people pollute and/or prevent legitimate discussion.

I get what you are saying but look at what happened to the 60s car here. Seatbelts don’t do anything for you if the other car is suddenly parked in your pelvis. None of the hard parts seem to reach at least the torso of the dummy in the modern car while in the 60s car the dummy ends up being pushed virtually into the back seat. Sure the seatbelt would have held it in the seat but it that does nothing as the bent door and the grill of the modern car crushed it’s lungs and liver areas. The airbag here wouldn’t have saved the dummy either of course. The thing that would have is a better crumple zone.