By treating any lies to the customer as criminal fraud.

For some reason misleading investors in a way that causes them to loose money lands you in jail very quickly. You must provide extensive 'inverstment risk' report with the shares you are selling.

But when selling a car or tickets to faulty and deadly airplane, you don't have to inform customers of all the flaws you've discovered.

The lawsuits of Theranos case and Anna Sorokin make it clear that our society has one set of laws for owners of capital, and another one for the plebs.

The proposed alternative, I think, is that the car company values a customer's life at more than the expected cost of settling.

The cost of settling is supposed to approximate the value of a human life, but it sounds pretty bad to say "yeah, we knew this defect would cost $50MM to fix, but we estimated only 5 people would die, and each person's life is worth less than $10MM because the settlement is only like $400k per life".

The proposed alternative is that the car company has to say "We calculated this defect will probably kill 5 people, so we will spend any amount of money to fix it, up to and including us having no profit"

Maybe cars with known technical/mechanical defects that will result in death could be recalled even in cases where it eats a bit more into the profits of the auto manufacturer than it would if they just paid settlements to the families who lost loved ones. That seems like a pretty good way to imagine this to work.

I imagine that they'd ddmit that the car as designed is bad and fix or replace the bad cars. Leaving cars on the road that have a design flaw that randomly kills people, because it's cheaper to pay off dead people's families is reprehensible.