Others have answered about the specifics of cars being wrecked. But in general, when you are talking about big budget films where the potential box office returns will be in the millions and billions, $200,000 is chump change. It has nothing to do with publicity or some elaborate scheme; it’s simply how the world of film/TV works.
For example, the budget to film/produce The Fast and the Furious series was in total $759 million dollars (0.7B). The world wide box office returns for those films totaled $3,900 million dollars (3.9B). Go ahead and wreck a pile of $200,000 cars because at the end of the day, the film will be vomiting more cash than the studios/producers know what to do with.
When a movie/TV show comes along and builds elaborate sets and trash them in the end, that is an equal “waste.” And heck, look at the world of computers where people drop test iPhones. To you and me, a $399 iPhone is a costly object. To a website/magazine that will get revenue from the article on the topic, that is just an expense of the piece.