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I guess your issue will be partly that those instances where drivers crash their cars into lamposts and everyone walks away fine won't be newsworthy.
aggi-
It's quite possible that I might gain the wrong impression, but I'm not conducting anything scientific here, so I'm not imagining I'm reaching any reliable conclusions. :)
Also, crashes into lampposts or trees are reportedly extremely rare--there are research papers on it. What I've seen so far is that most crashes into a narrow object at fairly high speed causes the vehicle to wrap itself around the obstacle and the usual protection against head-on crashes doesn't work. At lower speeds (no idea what the limit is), the car just comes to a halt, and when steering correction is still possible, this results in glancing blows.
Again, that may all be bollocks.
Oliver Schick
By way of contrast, here's a case in which someone has suffered life-threatening injuries after crashing into a lamppost:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/leytonstone-crash-man-fighting-for-life-after-crashing-car-into-lamppost-in-east-london-a3745806.html
Part of the reason why I started this thread was because I was interested in whether that evidently successful design objective of protecting people when crashing head-on into a wall, i.e. as per the ubiquitous and iconic crash test dummy images, was not insufficient given other types of crashes. The lamppost (or tree) problem that vehicles get wrapped around them seems completely unsolved (although perhaps not unaddressed, I just haven't been able to find anything conclusive on it).