[TheDong]

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"