To back up your point, this was a great blog post on the fatal consequences of failure in mission-critical car software: http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting...
After reading one may think: Why the fuck is there any dynamic memory allocation (stack) going on there? Why isn't the car software implemented as one big pre-allocated hierarchical state machine? You wouldn't expect such execution dynamism in hard circuits or even FPGAs. But in any case I think non-deterministic systems (especially complex CPUs+programs) should be outlawed for such mission critical signal paths.