I don't think there's all that many safety issues resulting from MISRA-C non-adherence that would be fixed by putting the entire thing on top of a VM. Also, I'd wager almost all issues that a VM can catch are also caught by using a safer language, e.g. Rust (without a VM.)
That said, the really bad safety issues in a car are probably on a much higher semantic level, i.e. "at X level of braking, do Y", which neither a VM nor a safer language like Rust could catch.
That said, the really bad safety issues in a car are probably on a much higher semantic level, i.e. "at X level of braking, do Y", which neither a VM nor a safer language like Rust could catch.