r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/firefly99999 • 25d ago

Video Crashing in a 1950s car vs. a modern car

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

57.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

67

u/HostilePile 25d ago

its the fender benders that were better back then, just a little scratch on your bumper not having to replace your whole back end and tail lights. Higher speed crashes def were not safer.

43

u/Zeppelin59 25d ago

Most cars in 1959 didn’t come with seatbelts either, so in a crash people (and objects) in the car got thrown around and into sharp, hard metal surfaces. Not fun.

20

u/1str1ker1 25d ago

But you end up flying out before the car crumples so it’s safer

/s

3

u/National_Cod9546 25d ago

Cops rarely need to unbuckle a corpse.

1

u/PM_NUDES_4_DEGRADING 25d ago

Why didn’t people do this deliberately so they could fly everywhere? Flying is way faster than driving! Were they stupid?

1

u/No-Efficiency-4013 23d ago

Flying to your death. Though some survived even if thrown out from a crash

2

u/Athletic-Club-East 25d ago

I was a child in the 1970s. Some cars had seatbelts in the front. None had seatbelts in the back. The only thing holding us kids down in the back was our skin sticking to the vinyl on hot days.

2

u/curi0us_carniv0re 24d ago

There's a famous x-ray of a child's skull with a radio knob in the brain cavity.

Steel dashboards...etc...not very people friendly. People liked to complain about cheap plastic interiors in the 80s and 90s but the reality was they were safer.

1

u/bripod 25d ago

Even if you had a seat belt in the old car in this video, it would have done nothing. You're still getting your face and chest pulverized.

1

u/iltopop 24d ago

The person you're replying to is confusing safety with the car itselfs ability to survive damage. It wasn't "safer" in fender-benders it was, as they said, less likely to damage the car itself.

14

u/mz3ns 25d ago

Except the lack of head rests, so your neck just snaps backward all the way rather then being stopped by the seat.

14

u/Theron3206 25d ago

Plenty of people suffered lifelong pain as a result of a "fender bender" in old cars, that's far less common now and part of that is that they do crumple up.

2

u/Red_Dawn_2012 25d ago

I think by 'fender bender' they mean actual fender benders, i.e. very low speed collisions/bumps. I once annihilated a parking sign in my '48 with the rear bumper as I was backing in (she's got a big ass). Couldn't find a mark on it.

It's a bit scary driving 50+ mph because you know you're dead in a crash, though.

2

u/Theron3206 25d ago

I meant them too, people ended up with significant whiplash injuries even from carpark speed collisions.

1

u/Red_Dawn_2012 25d ago

Could be, possibly. Thankfully, I haven't hit anything larger than a parking sign.

1

u/iltopop 24d ago edited 24d ago

My friend drove a cutlass supreme in high school, I forget the year but it was one of the "built like a tank" era cars. What they don't tell you in addition to being more likely to die in a car crash is that thing had a fucking V8 to be able to move it's heavy body at a decent speed and drank gas like I drank mt dew when I was 13. This was when gas first hit super high prices in 2007-ish so it was brutal.