I think the collision between engineers and accountants/executives is too often a fatal one, at least for the buyers of the product. It doesn't matter whether the product is a BMW, a Morton Thiokol solid rocket, a Ford Pinto, or the Hyatt Regency walkway. Engineers can certainly be guilty of hubris, and there's no doubt that they can be wrong about their original designs, but the real issue lies in the corporate culture that sits above the engineers. I'm not an engineer, but it's difficult for me to envision trained BMW designers and engineers receiving these reports from the field about multiple failures in their design and not taking it seriously. Engineers are scientists, and it's not the scientific method to see multiple failures of a similar nature in a design and decide "nah, it'll be fine". Contrarily, it's not difficult at all to envision discussions between BMW execs and their engineering staff about "how bad is this problem, really", in much the same way that Ford executives decided that it was cheaper to pay off the lawsuits from exploding Pinto fuel tanks than it was to repair the problem.
If I recall correctly, BMW did try and initially blame the fork problem on owners riding their motorcycles on really rough roads, and not any inherent flaw in their design.