That appalling crash video of an early Australian Holden Commodore should be taken in context. It was done to validate the test procedure, not the car! The car was a second-hand crate and was loaded with 300-kgs of sand, some in the boot. It was originally a European design from Opel which had to be beefed up just to survive Australian roads. The impact speed was 60-mph not the 35-mph you quoted - over three times the kinetic energy. Not survivable in anything!
The point is that such tools have been accessible and at low cost for a very long time
And my point was that these tools were simply not available at any cost when Roy was starting out, whereas they were the research basis for Wilson Benesch's foundation decades later.
I am a contemporary of Roy's and went through a highly regarded university where the word computer was never mentioned although the university had built a pioneering one called EDSAC in the late 1940s following on from the work at Bletchley Park. Also descended from Bletchley Park was Cybor House in Sheffield, widely regarded as the top operational research outfit in Europe. We had three computers there, an ICL mainframe, an Elliot 503 (still 2-tons in weight) and a real-time computer locked in a mobile truck for on-site process control development. All input was by punched cards (mainframe) or paper tape, so all batch processed.
Not a sign of a time-sharing terminal or a network, let alone a personal computer or a mobile phone. Things were totally different back in the day when Roy was starting Rega.

