I like old cars and I hate to see an irreplaceable ‘59 Chevy destroyed.  It does illustrate what may seem counter-intuitive to some, though.  Crumple zones make cars safe.  Good, solid, stiff metal simply transfers the impact to the passenger compartment.

As you may have learned in high school physics, the time of a collision is very import to the force of the impact.  Intelligent engineering makes cars much safer with crumple zones and airbags which ’slow down’ the negative acceleration. Crumple zones are explained here. The money quote from that article is this:

Cutting the deceleration in half cuts the force in half. Therefore, changing the deceleration time from .2 seconds to .8 seconds will result in a 75 percent reduction in total force.

I have been hectoring my kids about this for years. There is a good physics discussion here.  If you read and truly understand the equation, you will never ride a motorcycle again.