The Chevrolet Bel Air was the Toyota Camry of its time -- affordable, stylish and roomy -- and the best-selling car in America in 1959.

It was 17 1/2 feet long, nearly 7 feet wide and weighed more than 3,600 pounds. Mileage? Gas was 25 cents a gallon, and even if the Environmental Protection Agency had been invented, no one would have cared.

The 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, by comparison, is a tidy 16 feet long and nearly a foot narrower. Its 2.4-liter, four-cylinder engine gets 26 mpg highway/city combined, and it exhausts cleaner air than most baby boomers ever inhaled.

The video to the right shows what happens when past and present collide under controlled conditions.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurer-supported research group, brought the two together to demonstrate in dramatic fashion the improvements in car safety since its 1959 founding. The offset collision test pits two vehicles at 40 mph.

The driver in the Bel Air, its engineers concluded, would be in sorry shape. The car lacked seat belts, let alone air bags, allowing the driver to strike the unforgiving steering column, unpadded dashboard and roof.

The passenger compartment collapsed, crushing the crash dummy's legs. The seat was torn from the floor. The windshield popped out and the doors opened, possibly allowing the driver to be ejected.

On the other hand, the driver of the Malibu might have sustained an injury to his left foot, analysis of test data showed, but otherwise emerged unscathed.

Contrary to Internet suspicions, the IIHS assures us that the antique Chevy wasn't a ringer: There is indeed an engine in the car, and the red cloud of dust that shows during the slow-motion replays isn't rust, merely 50 years of road grime.

What changed in a half-century? The insurance institute cites the crush protection engineered into new cars, dissipating the energy in a controlled manner so that seat belts and air bags have time to do their jobs. (See MSN Autos' take on the 10 most significant safety features.)

View the videos in the gallery to see other recent crash tests.

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