No comprehensive statistics. However, personally I feel I see more LG battery issues than Samsung:
Bolts have in fact been recalled long ago already. Your circle of death may (or may not) be a battery failure, but even if, not necessarily a safety issue (did it fail on you at high speed, locking wheels and causing a dangerous situation, or simply did not start). Recalls are more likely going to happen for safety related issues. Not starting in the morning is more of a warranty issue than a recall. Every consumer product out there will have failures in the field. Even Apple products sometimes turn out DOA, or fail shortly thereafter, even though Apple is considered a high quality product. I personally know one person who had their iPhone camera fail within a month of usage (it might have been DOA, it's just that the owner never used the front facing camera for a month after getting the iPhone). I've read about people who had their iPhones and iPads come dead out of the box too - not even powering on. The devil is always in the details - what percentage of products are failing, and how dangerous the failures are. That determines whether or not a wide recall is warranted.
Totally agree.
My theory is this is a result of internet combined with human nature. Internet shrunk the world into a giant global village. Our brains instinctively infer risks and probabilities based on what we see - an evolutionary shortcut for our brains. This used to work when humans were living in small groups, but fails miserably when humans are exposed to billions of people, and most of that exposure is designed to maximize engagement, which means most of what we see in the news and on the internet is going to be negative stories, or stories manipulated to be negative when interpreted through the lens of our worldview. Internet is the light speed evolutionary incubator of such stories (think "viral" content). This leads the human brain to significantly overestimate risks and probabilities of bad things happening. If the internet was feeding us all positive stories, our brains would also overestimate the probabilities of positive things, but those are rare (positive stories have much lower engagement). One example of positive stories I can think of is interviews with lottery winners. Humans see the winners on the news often, which leads them to believe they have a chance of winning which is many orders of magnitude greater than reality. For the human brain to make an accurate assessment of the probability of winning the lottery, that human would have to be forced to see not just interview with the winners on the news, but sit through and watch every single person who played and their result (which for some lotteries would take longer than a human lifespan just for a single drawing). Only then the human brain would accurately infer that playing a lottery is a completely losing proposition. Of course we have a brain capable to learning statistics and critical thinking, but unfortunately most people in the world do not acquire these skills, they go on instinct instead.
