And I get downvoted for saying self-driving car companies should be fined signficant amounts of money for both car accidents due to poor self-driving software capabilities but also for security breaches.

What if it's "cheaper" for the car companies to let the cars crash than adopt stronger security? You may think that there's no way a recall would be worth it, but we're already seeing companies such as Tesla "fix" the issue over the air, and chances are most of the new self-driving cars will be fixed the same way, if not all.

The only thing that would be left is the "bad PR", which may be much smaller in the future, because there won't be any recalls. If only 2 people die, and then all cars are fixed, the outrage just won't be as big as when 100 people die due to a brake malfunction, and then 5 million cars have to be recalled, impacting 5 million people (as opposed to only the families of those two in the former example) that would then personally spread the bad news.

Also the "bad PR" doesn't seem to affect tech companies, or even retailers, or banks, all that much, so I doubt it would affect car companies that much more in the future (for the reasons I mentioned above).