The finite element techniques have become in last twenty/thirty years a key tool to design crash and passenger safety systems. LS-DYNA has always been at the forefront when accurately predicting the behaviour of metallic structures in crashworthiness applications. Most recently, a lot of new materials were introduced into the automotive field with different targets, mainly for weight reduction, i.e. Plastics, Composites, Aluminium, Magnesium and new types of High Strength Steels. Considering that many of these materials show a low ductile behaviour or may be used in highly loaded applications, their failure during a crash event has to be considered. Moreover, joining of these materials presents another source of potential failure. As a consequence, the capability in predicting failure of material and connections has become one of the most important frontiers to assess the reliability of a finite element model. In this paper, the most important approaches implemented in LS-DYNA to evaluate failure will be shown and analysed, with the intent of introducing new users to these methodologies. Moreover, the effectiveness of LS-DYNA in the prediction of the behaviour, also in terms of failure, of the materials mentioned above will be proved by comparing numerical and physical results.