[quartesixte]

>So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then?

They do. At least the, "engineering of the vehicle itself and then manufacturing it" part.

A lot of Aerospace designing, testing, and manufacturing is built off the foundation the automotive world laid down. Heck, one of the key standards, the SAE standard, is called such because it literally stands for Society of Automotive Engineers.

Cars may be involved in a lot of deaths every year. But rarely do people die because their car spontaneously combusted/fell apart while someone drove it.

[regularfry]

There was a joke running round the European car manufacturers a couple of decades ago that the European Space Agency literally couldn't hire rocket scientists because they'd all been poached to work on drive-by-wire systems. I don't know how true it actually was, but the point is that in a lot of cases it's not just going to be the same standards, it's literally the same individuals.