[jerf]

A more productive line of questioning, rather than prodding them to convert their probably-quite-substantial codebase into a language that, with all due respect to the Rust team, is probably still a wee bit cutting edge to be putting in self-driving cars, is to ask them what static analysis tools they've been using and why their static-analysis tool missed this one.

If the answer is "no static analysis tool", there's your problem.

But as my first paragraph implied, they can't catch everything, so "we installed many layers of protection and it still got through even so" is definitely a possibility. Rust may have a different set of such issues but they will of course always exist.