In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved remarkably.

Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, which you can see in the video embedded below.

In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy, which was surprising to me. I wash shocked to see that supposedly rock-solid car literally come apart at the seams, explosively, as if it were built of plastic. The crash test was conducted at an event to celebrate the contributions of auto insurers to highway safety progress over 50 years.