Racing cars have a totally different safety system in place with different objectives. Racing cars have a 5-point harness to keep the driver locked into the seat, and a Hans device to keep the neck from deforming too far (this is a recent development), and a very strong cage around the driver to keep the driver compartment from being deformed, and the driver wears a helmet as protection from head injuries. While this is a very good and effective strategy and it is why NASCAR and other racing organizations use it ... It is not practical for road cars. Most people can't be bothered to strap on a helmet every time they drive, and there is enough trouble getting people to just do up a normal lap and shoulder belt with one buckle. And that cage is pretty intrusive against getting in and out of the car - nevermind what passengers are supposed to do.
That cop was not wrong about wearing a helmet, particularly in the cars of that era ... but most people aren't going to do that ...
The 5-point-harness + helmet + Hans + cage approach does provide protection against repeated impacts, which the seat belt + pretensioner + airbag + crumple zone strategy does not. But in real world collisions, it is far more likely for a NASCAR travelling 180 mph to have a multiple-impact scenario than it is for a normal car in normal traffic to have a multiple-impact scenario. The modern "smart" airbags that only fire off when they have to, are intended to protect against real world scenarios where you have a minor impact (car glances off something ...) followed by a big one (... into a tree).
If you are actually concerned about whether your car is capable of ramming through a gate or pushing something out of the way (I'm not!), I would actually suggest that in a modern vehicle with smart airbags IF you are wearing your seat belts, an impact with a closed gate is unlikely to cause the airbags to fire, and if the impact with the gate was severe enough to fire the airbags, you weren't gonna get through that gate anyhow.
I can think of no realistic collision scenario where I'd rather be in a 1972 Impala than in a 2016 Impala.
Here is a chart to ponder:
http://images.thetruthaboutcars.com/201 ... aveled.jpg
Seat belts started showing up in the 1960s and air bags started showing up in the 1980s in meaningful numbers and became mandatory somewhere near 1990. Bear in mind that the average vehicle on the roads is something like 11 years old, so it takes a while for improvements to show up in a chart like this.
Has traffic gotten better? No, it has gotten worse.
Have drivers gotten better? Not around here, they haven't.
Cell phones were invented. Bad.
Smart phones were invented with texting and emailing possible. Bad, bad, bad.
Have roads gotten better? In many cases, yes. But with more people using them, more transport trucks, more people yapping on the phone.
We have ABS, we have stability control. No question this has helped. But this didn't really become mainstream until towards the end of that graph.
But a lot of this ... is purely down to vehicles being more crashworthy now than they were in the past.