In 1.10 this is still an issue.

Seriously I cannot imagine it to be intentional. Yesterday I bumped into a roadsign with my Sarka after a lag spike, doing no more than 15-20 kmph. Both front wheels, front doors, hood and radiator went straight from pristine to ruined. Since it was a Sarka the engine was still fine though, but you REALLY have to look at the damage multipliers for vehicles. This is beyond silly, in real life this extent of damage would be expected after slamming into a stone wall in 50 kmph or so...

And why do wheels take damage from bumping into a roadsign?

How it could reasonably be balanced: (damage from one crash)

1-10 kmph - NO damage
11-20 slight damage to body depending on point of impact. (~from pristine to worn)
21-30 more body damage, radiator damage (~damaged)
31-40 severe body and radiator damage, some wheel damage (~badly damaged)
41-50 catastrophic body and radiator damage (~ruined, engine itself repairable on the sturdier cars)
51+ car totalled

From what I've seen damage to players is better balanced although I nearly passed out from nudging that roadsign, which is a bit excessive. I have been involved in traffic accidents a couple of times irl, you're not knocked senseless at impacts around 20-30 kmph...

Footnote - the overly squishy cars are especially punishing because of how easy it is to crash due to lag and server stutter. Until vehicle simulation stability is better you might want to consider making cars a lot tougher to compensate. Players do not enjoy spending time and blood to get a car going and then seeing it get wasted after five minutes due to a lag spike...

This is STILL an issue in 1.14 Experimental (and of course 1.13 Stable).

Please @Geez would it be possible to somehow bump this up in the list of priorities for some kind of temporary fix in 1.14? Vehicles are extremely fragile to bein with - far too fragile to be honest. So, with the fact that even the tiniest bit of lag makes it difficult to avoid collisions, due to the car suddenly gaining speed or shifting sideways or manouvering input becoming exaggerated due to input or server side lag, you REALLY ought to make vehicles way more robust until the underlying vehicle physics issues are fixed.

It can take hours to assemble a working vehicle while a millisecond of lag can ruin it. Hitting a road sign doing about 10-15 should NOT leave you with ruined radiator, tires etc...

The above issues force most community servers to use No-Vehicle-Damage mods that instead turn cars into indestructible tanks, which is no fun either. Just give cars some more hit points and increase the impact speed before the cars actually start taking damage.

(On my own servers I use a tiny but efficient mod to achieve this, it simply reduces the damage taken by vehicles and their passengers by a set percentage and applies a threshold amount of damage needed before any damage is applied. So, small low-speed impacts do not become catastrophic while crashing at high speeds is still fatal.)

honestly I still think there should be some form of maximum damage done, maximum damage for example 40% of the total damage the car can take, whenever you bug the car it would only suffer 40% of the total damage instead of automatically destroying it, ie you would have 3 bugcrashs until the car destroys.

Fix for this in the latest 1.14 experimental build seems to be working. Crashed my Ada into a car wreck doing about 20 kmph today and it was NOT totalled! I didn't want to sacrifice my ride to see where collisions start doing significant damage, but definitely progress here. Thanks guys!

Hello, in the current 1.16 experimental it seems vehicles have taken a giant leap backwards. Twice I have crashed in low speeds (about 20 kmph) due to lag spikes and both times my car was nearly totalled. Both wheels ruined, radiator ruined, spark plug ruined. If I am to guess I think the server somehow - through desync or lag - gets a much higher velocity value than what is actually going on and calculates way more damage than it should.

Suggestion - set a higher limit to what speeds where damage will start to apply, it is just not logical that a car gets ruined so easily. Also nearly always every component goes directly from pristine to ruined, the damage states don't come into play since the damage is too high. In 5,000+ hours of gameplay I think I have used a tire repair kit about five times total. It is nearly always a case of needing to replace two ruined wheels (and battery/radiator/spark plug) if you're so lucky that the car wasn't instantly ruined..

it should even be like that, each beat skipping in a way for example leaves pristine, goes to worn, then goes to damaged and finally bad damage would be much more realistic and is the easiest way to solve problems

Can confirm. My group and I have lost 3 cars in the last 3 weeks to stupid low speed collisions with road signs. All under 20kph, all ended with ruined tires, spark, rad and battery from pristine. I don't see how the rad and spark plug can get ruined when the fenders and bumper only dropped to worn/damaged. We're giving up on cars for now, which is frustrating because that's a large part of building a base and group play.

If you spawn cars using the admin tools, then their endurance is ok, you can poke into obstacles for a long time. But if the car appears on map naturally, then it falls apart from a light touch, despite pristine parts and a 'green' indicator.