For automotive software the ISO 26262 is the equivalent to RTCA DO-178 in avionics. ISO 26262 highly recommends that ASIL C and D-classified systems utilize semiformal and formal verification among other techniques to verify software unit design and implementation.
That is because the formal method supplement of the DO-178C is RTCA DO-333. There you have about a hundred pages concerned with the application of formal methods.
And what the OPAL functional language [1] did since the mid 80s. Though the concept there is expanded from simple reference counting by additional static analysis during compile time (making use of the functional semantics of the language) to avoid reference counting when for example the compiler can find/prove sequential increment/decrement counts, then the reference counting code is eliminated.