As long as there is no criminal liability for people doing this, nothing will change. This is pocket change for a company, rounding error, as Tesla's valuation has gone significantly since this happened in 2019, six years ago.
As long as there is no criminal liability for people doing this, nothing will change. This is pocket change for a company, rounding error, as Tesla's valuation has gone significantly since this happened in 2019, six years ago.
The question is not how much does this cost vs the value of the company; it's how much does this cost vs the cost to just do things the right way. $329 Million is orders of magnitude more than it would cost to implement the additional warnings and geofencing. It's hard to imagine any possible corner that could be cut that would save enough money to justify that sort of risk.
Further, it's one fee for a single accident. Since then there have been 756 more Tesla Autopilot crashes. If each of those got a similar payout, that would be 80% of Tesla's current market cap. Obviously they won't all payout that much, but if on average an autopilot crash cost Tesla $56 Million to handle (settlement + legal expenses + lost sales), that would wipe out the company's profit entirely. There's no possible justification for leaving such a massive liability in place.
There is no company for which $329M is "pocket change". This is a huge fine, even for Tesla.
I think OP's point is - the fine is not large enough to impact Tesla's stock price - which is all Tesla cares about.
It also didn't really seem to impact Tesla's decision to keep pushing Full Self Driving and Robotaxi despite it having obvious severe flaws (because Tesla sees this rollout as something holding up its stock price).
Tesla cares about Free Cash Flow. This fine negatively and materially impacts FCF. Tesla cares about this fine.
They obviously care about losing $300M.
Like, if they have a chance, they are going to keep $300M.
That is obvious.
OP's point is - it is not having any impact on Tesla's reckless decisions.
Stock price is #1 on the list of their concerns. FCF is somewhere much lower in the list.
"in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long term it's a weighing machine"
They definitely care about the FCF impact of this fine and what it says about future liability.