It's hard to judge from the video, but the car doesn't appear to have been going very fast, and it looks like the side of the truck crumpled a bit to absorb the impact.

Airbag inflation is a violent, potentially injurious, last-ditch effort to prevent fatalities. If the airbags didn't inflate but the driver walked away from the accident, then not activating was probably the safer option.

Early days of airbags had fairly simple deployment requirements.

Current vehicles have a lot more, in terms of impingement, impact direction, instant and sustained G-forces, etc. When teaching EMTs we use airbag deployment as an indicator of potentially serious mechanism, but the reverse isn't true - you can't automatically dismiss an accident as minor because there was no deployment in an airbag-equipped vehicle.

That tweet and its replies note that the driver was uninjured and that the airbags might not have been required. For example:

> Looking at the HQ video, it looks like the impact speed wasn’t that bad and the crumpling of the truck decelerated the car nicely. The passenger compartment is fine.