The turn of which century?

That was honestly my first question when I read your title.

But yes, there was little liability for early autos. Which in turn had a tendancy to fall apart in collisions. And cars continued to not pay much attention to safety until the government began passing laws about it and (probably more importantly) a lawsuit over a design mistake of the Ford Pinto resulted in [link|http://www.uoguelph.ca/~sharoon/a1/A1disaster.htm|huge judgements]. (Advice to executives everywhere. If you do a back of the envelope calculation of how much it costs to do things right versus how much you expect to pay for lawsuits over early deaths, make sure that envelope gets destroyed...)

Before that the attitude was that safety doesn't sell. After that it was that unsafety costs. The software industry is definitely at the point where security doesn't sell. I would like to see it moved to the latter one...

Cheers,
Ben