Watch the Difference 20 Years Has Made to Car Crash Safety

[Narrator] Watching car crash tests

is horrifying and mesmerizing, in equal measure.

Here, we're seeing the difference that two decades

of ever-improving car design has made to safety.

Europe's Car Safety Assessment Program, Euro NCAP,

is 20 years old, and to mark the occasion,

it staged a test.

It put a Rover 100 from 1997

up against its modern city car equivalent, the Honda Jazz,

and pitted both of them against a metal barrier

at 40 miles an hour.

Although it has seemingly modern safety features

like airbags, the Rover 100 earned

just one star out of five.

The driver dummy rattles around the inflated bag.

His legs would have been crushed.

He may have suffered head injuries,

and the body and door of the car are so twisted,

it might be tough to get him out.

The Honda Jazz driving dummy fares much better.

Improvements in the structure of the car and tech,

like side curtain airbags, keep him in place and protected.

That car gets five stars.

In the U.S., the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,

or IIHS, painted a more dramatic picture

of car safety evolution when it smashed

a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air into a 2009 Chevy Malibu.

Both end up looking like mangled metal,

but the newer car disperses the energy

of the impact in a totally different way.

Instead of a steering column slamming into his body,

the driver of the Malibu gets cushioned and contained.

Now that they're nearly out of places to stuff more airbags,

engineers are focused on active safety,

using tools like automatic braking

to dodge crashes in the first place.

Until computer-controlled self-driving cars

can actually deliver on the promise

of making all crashes a thing of the past,

trials like these are the best tools

automotive designers have to test the machines

supposed to keep us safe.

And these head-to-heads show their efforts are working.