So I'm not looking up the numbers for this but to devils advocate...
Acceleration is way up since then, gasoline cars included. Crash tests are better. Collision avoidance and rear views make us safer as well. Reliability probably peaked already though.
The problem is all those wonderfully tuned, reliable, and efficient mechanical parts require millions of lines of source code and some really intricate wiring to make them move. And you'll never have the documentation or the source code to keep it all going. So that means it'll probably be scrap long before it has reached EOL mechanically.
Creating an end product that is elegant with intelligently integrated subsystems is not something we care about so it doesn't get done.