functional safety and certification in automotive software

TL;DR: Who of you works on automotive safety critical software and wouldn't trust the very product their working on with their life?

I worked with a team for a few months building automotive software. While I was not involved in safety critical stuff myself some of my colegues where. They frequently complained about the legacy code still in use today and how unmaintainable it was. When they showed it to me I was in shock. What I saw triggered smt. in me wanting to rip the harddrive out of their PC and burn it on the spot. Seriously it was frighteningly bad and thus a serious safety issue. Yet, noone seemed to care. Also the products using this software are on the road today and thus have to be at least ISO 26262 certified right?

How is this possible? Do we have a serious problem with functional safety in automotive software or is this one company just an outlier? Does the certification system work in your experience or is it up to the morale of the team building it to ensure nobody gets killed?