I remembered there was a case that a car company (chevron?) had a flawed car brand, the company decided not to recall as in their calculation, the total compensation for accidents would be cheaper than fixing all the cars.

So, yeah, some people do make such calculation. But the majority of the mass don't do that, the moral judgement of the mass are usually emotion-driven or event-driven or pattern-matching or just blindly following KOLs they like. The majority probably wouldn't do such calculation until they are in really hard position, and they would probably take decisions that favor their own interest in those situations.