Your perception about the safety of 1970s cars is off - you are massively less likely to die or be seriously injured in a car built in 2025 than any car in any car built in the 1970s.
70s and 80s cars were built for the little "whoopsie that's a mailbox", "didn't see you merging there" and "oh golly me, this snow sure is slick, and that's a ditch right there" mishaps that are the overwhelmingly dominant form of vehicle accidents. If you didn't actually care to fix things, many accidents that would be thousands of dollars today were $0 back then because required systems remained functional (that was the whole point of those mandated 10mph bumpers).
If your want to survive hitting stopped traffic at 40mph because you were too busy shitposting in traffic, modern car all the way. Depending on the details you may very well walk away without a scratch. It's really marvelous how good they are at keeping people uninjured, or at least alive.
But the overwhelming majority of people's driving experience reflects the former accident type, not the latter, hence why people have the opinions they do. And you can't really blame them. The odds of any given person being in an injurious accident in their life are low, lower still if you avoid a few key behaviors everyone agrees are bad.
In the 70s there we about 1/4 as many cars on the road in my country compared to today, but 5 times as many road deaths.
People got killed or seriously injured all the time before improvement in safety standards. As a society having to replace 50 $1000 bumpers to save 1 person being seriously injured is a great deal.
You're basically using the outlier here to mislead about the typical/median and erroneously implying that they're more linked than they are.
40-50yr ago in the era of 10mph bumpers and whatnot the typical experience was superior because the typical driver is experiencing minor no-injury mishaps. Sliding off the road in the snow at low speed was a tow truck bill and only that, not $2k just to get the car drivable again.
Buuuuuuut, the results for the minority of drivers experiencing injurious crashes was way, way worse back then, as the people who screech about stats are happy to tell you.
What makes a car cheap to repair for the average user getting in the median or average accident and survivable for the guy who gets piss drunk and drives off a cliff are mostly tangential from each other. There's no reason we can't have both and there's no reasonable and non-malicious reason to hide or downplay the regression on this axis. Modern cars would likely perform way better than old cars if shrugging off minor accidents was not a decreased design priority due to stiffer cabins and other changes in construction.
The stuff that makes modern cars get totaled in minor hits is mostly a reflection of styling and fuel economy based choices.
The typical driver was significantly more likely to die back then. Modern cars shrug off small accidents too - you just end up with dents or scratches or other ugly but cosmetic body damage.
The thing that makes modern cars so easy to total is unibody construction. We do that to save on costs, but also because it leads to better ride quality and fuel efficiency.
