Unfortunately it's impossible to build a practical car strong enough to survive being t-boned by a dump truck.
I disagree, until we know the exact circumstances.
You can make a car out of a structure that just doesn't deform (e.g. less ductile than nearly anything else out there), like a Sherman tank. However, this means that on a head to head collision on something with as much mass (e.g. Tank vs fully loaded dump truck is probably pretty close) you are facing a VERY sudden deceleration- like 100G or so, which would cause concussions, etc, and kill you dead. So we add crumple zones, which try to greatly reduce that, by absorbing some of the forces; airbags to help cushion the impact of the body, etc.
I've always respected that the battery pack is a pretty solid mass, and probably doesn't deform very much with regards to protecting the passenger space from a T-bone, where the frunk would normally save you. My interest here is what ACTUALLY happened... lets go to an extreme, and say I welded an I-beam mad-max style onto the side, and then ran said dump truck at a moderate 20MPH directly into the side. Ignore the airbags and G force for a moment... the force would unlikely deform the cabin much beyond the depth of the plow (as the plow is about a car length wide, and the I beam would hypothetically catch the entire plow , so the force would be distributed over the 18' or so of the car), and likely knock the car out of the way, eventually pushing it aside or allowing the driver to slow. Some flying glass, possibly, but tempered for minimal damage beyond surface tissue. In THIS case the G force would be the largest probable hit, and at a moderate speed, would likely be whiplash and maybe a concussion if no airbags, but probably not enough for fatality.
Now we know that mad-max stuff is likely unlikely to be approved for public use, and isn't pretty to the majority of the populace... but it poses an interesting discussion that much like the torque on a MS blows the average ICE out of the water, we now can discuss something coming close to that with crash testing... as opposed to the average ICE, which folds like a cheap card table.
There are a LOT of fun reasons to have a Tesla, but one of the more priceless things is the safety factor... my family doesn't have a price tag, and even if money was irrelevant, I can't think of a car I'd rather be in (or have my family in) if this kind of horror was completely inevitable.
The computer assistance options, as we advance in science, can also help beyond that of the human response time. No blame to Tesla today, of course, but would a large dump truck NOT show up on a radar, with a collision vector to the MS? As we advance with this, with autonomous driving, we are going to be safer and safer on the road. I'm very proud to be a shareholder to a company advancing this end.
Again, condolences that where we are today, wasn't enough, today (er, yesterday).
