Do you have any reliable source for working systems that protect you at that speed? I'd consider collisions at that speed lethal - or it's your lucky day. Ignoring the body material. In DE you are told (not that I can confirm that by experience) in your driving lessons that collisions > 30 KPH (K!) are very, very dangerous and that the statistical 'you might be heavily injured' line is somewhere around there. So .. I'm having trouble imagining something that hits anything else with 70-80 MPH.
McClaren (the guy in the original article) works on F1 race cars. They regularly have collisions at greater than 100MPH with out any injuries to the driver. (and yes some of them are into fixed objects like the track wall).
Here in California there is a wealth of data on injury and damages in collisions between 50 and 100MPH [1]. In general, when all applicable safety systems are employed (seatbelts, nothing obstructing airbags, Etc) the injuries sustained are rarely fatal and for the most part don't required a hospital stay. We have a condition called "Tule Fog" which is a dense low hanging fog that can occur rather suddenly, which every other year or so results in the collective colliding of anywhere from 3 to 75 vehicles at speeds from 10MPH to 60MPH. Again, people don't die in these pile ups generally unless the passenger space of the vehicle is compromised (like being shoved under the trailer of a semi-truck for example). In their table of 'injuries and fatalities' for 2009 [2] out of 201,660 collsions there were 2,594 with fatalities so a 1.3% rate.
Probably not a good day, but survivable with a modern car. Most crashes have some angle to them which reduces the forces involved. Hitting a brick wall perfectly perpendicular is rare.
Do you have any reliable source for working systems that protect you at that speed? I'd consider collisions at that speed lethal - or it's your lucky day. Ignoring the body material. In DE you are told (not that I can confirm that by experience) in your driving lessons that collisions > 30 KPH (K!) are very, very dangerous and that the statistical 'you might be heavily injured' line is somewhere around there. So .. I'm having trouble imagining something that hits anything else with 70-80 MPH.