system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are car crashes with airbag deployment mostly considered total wrecks?
gpt
There's a certain threshold where the airbags deploy. You obviously don't want them going off when there's a low-speed collision, so only higher-speed collisions set them off. 

It also happens that cars are designed to deform in order to absorb the energy of those higher-speed collisions. If the cars were solid, they would just transfer most of the energy of the collision to the occupants. By deforming, less energy makes it to the occupants.

These two things happen to have a good degree of overlapping. Depending on the specifics of a collision, you might have a write-off without the airbags deploying, or you might have the airbags deploying without a write-off.

One additional factor is that the airbags destroy a good portion of the interior when they get set off. Especially if you have full curtain airbags, basically every surface of the interior will require replacing. At that point, it's easier to just get a new car given the other damage that also happened.