In this superb three-minute video, you’ll receive a crash course (sorry) in the physics of automobile collisions. There’s some important stuff to learn here, so let’s dive right in. 

There’s a stubborn myth in the vintage car community that just won’t die: that old cars are safer than new cars in a collision. It’s certainly understandable—we love our old cars, after all—and the reasoning does follow a certain kind of logic. The big old classics, especially the Detroit iron of the ’30s through the ’60s, are made of stout stuff, with foot-deep frame rails and fenders that clang when you rap on them. Surely these rolling fortresses are safer in a crash than current automobiles of lightweight construction, or so the the old shop tales go.

In truth, that’s dead wrong. An extremely rigid vehicle is precisely what you don’t want in an impact. For optimum survivablity with minimum injury, you want to be riding in a structure with some controlled deformation, absorbing the bulk of the crash force and allowing your body to ride down the deceleration in a gradual, carefully managed fashion. As they used to say about airplane crashes: It’s not the fall that gets you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Today the automakers spend untold man-hours and billions of dollars engineering their vehicles to artfully collapse in an impact, sacrificing their chassis and bodies for the good of their passengers.

At the web media outfit MinutePhysics, the folks there have a motto: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” (Attributed to Albert Einstein, or was it Lord Rutherford?) They put together this awesome little whiteboard talk that in just three minutes, provides a simple but technically proficient explanation of the basic physics of a car crash, and how modern cars are engineered to allow you to survive it. Here are the most educational three minutes you will spend today.