Seemingly reliable for a specific type of problem, though. Most reliable software doesn't require a distributed network to be reliable, and I don't think binary execution on BEAM is any more inherently reliable than the JVM, right?
The BEAM is designed for a software architecture approach called OTP in the Erlang community -- it is designed around trees of process supervision. So there is an entire robust framework for reliability really built in as a primary concern for the BEAM.