If you ask a rocket scientist to make you a car that passes the crash test ratings alone, they'll build you a tungsten dump truck.
If you're going to win, you might as well reach the destination without noticing that you've had a collision.
If you're going to win, you might as well reach the destination without noticing that you've had a collision.
I don't think that is true.
The video is a commercial, so they will have chosen an impact angle and speed that makes the newer car look best). For example, you can see that the newer car is heavier than the old one from the video; its front wheels still move forward when the wheels of the old one already go back. Because of that, the new car has a much longer braking distance than the old one. Things would have looked relatively better for the old car if they had chosen a collision with a concrete wall.
Also, Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone, the crumple zone was patented in 1952; chances are this 1959 car doesn't have a good one.
If its crumple zone is bad or absent, chances are that the older car would have survived way better in a frontal collision, where the beam carrying the engine would be elastically compressed without deforming permanently.
That would be just the car, though; those old cars could be lethal at incredibly low speeds, for example by impaling them on their non-collapsible steering column.
EDIT: this one: http://youtu.be/V5R80yUUVNk
A single solid tungsten dump truck would have almost twice the mass of the wall. Even with a completely inelastic collision, the wall's going to shatter and move. For a 35 mph collision, I think you're right, that wall would ultimately bring the truck to a halt from friction with the ground. At higher speeds, I think the truck might make it through.
Tungsten is quite dense (19,300 kg/m^3). Such a truck would have a mass of >400 metric tons (2 x 3 x 4 m x 19 tons/m^3), or >247 Toyota Tacomas (2013 extended cab, curb weight 3560 lb --> 1618 kg).
The truck would be terrifying to drive, once you got it going. I don't know how you'd turn.
Alas, Youtube is short on tungsten dumptrucks, but this may suffice. In a demonstration, a truck uses its brakes to stop after obliterating a few cars. The truck is driven by a real person.
So around the max takeoff weight of a 747, with approximately as heavy duty a wheel setup I assume. That would be quite a truck.
Flashbacks of Austin Powers and a steam roller...