True, AUTOSAR is the current standard for embedded automotive systems. Regarding safety I heard different things about it, some parties would only use it for up to ASIL A, others to C, others also to D. My personal opinion is that AUTOSAR (and even it's basics like C as a programming language and the OSEK OS) are not the best solutions that we should come up with for all the safety critical tasks in the autonomous driving world. Someone like Lattner would clearly have the potential to improve the current state of the art there a lot - but it's uncertain if Tesla would share any advantages with the remaining industry.

And regarding memory allocation in reliable automotive systems: Yes, the best practice would be not to allocate at all to get to some deterministic behavior. However I've seen lots of projects where "don't allocate" is implemented as "don't allocate with malloc", and you find dozens of custom memory allocators and pools throughout the code. Some of those designs are probably less reliable and safe than using a garbage collected language would be.