Still vividly remember my father's 1952 Buick.  Beautiful car, but probably not safe.  The dashboard was all steel.  The steering wheel was huge and had a huge hub in the middle.  No seat belts, no airbags, no crumple zones.  First car I ever rode in and I'm still here to talk about it.

Those AI voices you added in really really suck big time!!!

As a teen in the 1960s on traffic probation for speeding (going 35mph in a 25-mile zone), we were made to watch films like this. Specifically, Signal 30 (Ohio Highway Patrol).

Car wrecks sure brought out the gawkers.

70 years later, not a single person in these clips is alive today. Time doesn't heal all wounds, it kills the survivors.

Being ancient, can recall almost all of these cars and either me owning a few or else my dada or grand parents. Frightening how unsafe they were compared to the cars of today with seat belts, crumple zones, air bags and door latches that keep the doors closed. Did others notice how many head sized holes in windshields and steering wheels mashed straight up?

From Sydney, Australia, we had right hand drive versions of nearly every car shown, as a now 70-year-old most were on the road when I was a little kid.  One of the worst features was the old manual seat runners, some were to "poncy" and small to hold in place with a couple of peoples weight on them in an accident and tore out from the floor. Some seat frames themselves were too small and flimsy under load of people in accident G-force and thirdly the old push lever and jerk the seat on the runners to suit your leg length, sometimes the adjustment tongue did not lock and locate correctly allowing the seat to fly along its runners, OR the tongue just tore out when under load from accident G-force.  Even as late as 1979 here in Australia the new XD series Aussie designed & built Ford Falcons that were on basically a stretched "fox" platform had a massive recall due to insufficient seat frame strength, the fault found initially by one of the nation's state police forces where they had experienced seat frame failure and cracking in ordinary use, when they crash tested some lightly damaged police service vehicles that state's police accident investigation team wanted to push to have EVERY NEW FORD FALCON de-REGISTERED AND SENT BACK TO FORD AUST' FOR A REFUND !!!!  This did not occur, but it was egg all over Ford Aust's face with the then biggest ever Aussie car recall to have new heavy duty seats fitted to EVERY new already registered XD Falcon. GM Holden's Aust had a huge time with TV adverts showing just how much they had strengthened and re-designed the WHOLE body shell and seat frames of the Opel Rekord / Vauxhall Carlton that GM Holdens were selling here as the new "european" sized Holden Commodore and GMHA's effort paid off as the slightly smaller Holden was the same weight or HEAVIER in some trims than the obviously bigger Falcon, however the GM cars heavier gauge steel paid off, with aging versions years later near rust free whereas the same age Falcons had been scrapped years earlier due to annual inspection fails due to chronic rust issues.

I remember these films in Drivers ED 1981 ... Joel in Florida

Motion n movement is the culprit of all accidents

This reminds me of the films I watched in Driver’s Ed and that was in ‘82 but they used films like this from the 1950s and the early’60s to make a point. It did with me!

This is hard to watch because by the looks of these cars most were fatalities.

Your car, no matter how new, is only as safe as you.

I remember a lot of these models on the road.  The difference between cars of 1950 or 1951 and cars of 1957 is amazing.  Basically,  Automobiles of the very early fifties were still holdovers from 1941 models.

All those steering wheels, mangled from noncollapsible steering columns being shoved into the passenger compartment in front-end collisions while the driver is simultaneously being violently thrown forward against them--the odds for survival were not good!

The audio sounds like you had to play it backwards for some sort of copyright issue!!

The cars were beautiful but death traps, no safety belts, no crumble zones, no disk brakes, no radial tires and many were impaled by the steering column.

Why add in the annoying sound, these were most likely shot with 16mm cameras for home use which had no sound at that period of time.

2_15 - That's a 1953 Chevy, my first car.

It’s funny how things are different now.  The car crashes aren’t funny, but back in the day when I was a kid and just a young man, a car crash was almost a community event. Well, when there was a crash, everybody wanted to go down and see what happened and what was bent and who was injured and how many wheels fell off and it was like going to the county fair in some ways. Now everybody just drives by and takes a quick look and goes on about their business.

Seeing those spidered windshields tells me the driver and or front-seat passenger's heads slammed into it!😬