[mabhatter]

America car companies issue recalls all the time. That is what's getting Toyota in trouble from the start. A company I worked for was involved in those decisions made with days of discovering a slightly wrong raw material grade was shipped. Because that wrong part didn't meet the spec and MIGHT cause a problem in the part after it wore down five years from now. They paid for testing and proved the raw material was equivalent in performance and didn't have to recall. But it happened in days/weeks long before the parts would have had any failures.

American companies took to using recalls as "preventive" measures decades ago. They learned to have a lot of them without the government forcing them so that the really nasty ones get buried in the shuffle and the mechanic just replaces the parts he's told...

Toyota fought the government hard every step of the way, even in making the design materials and manufacturing information hauled off to Japan... mostly because the pedal issue already had large lawsuits before Toyota even acknowledged looking at the problem. If they issued a recall, all that was going to hit the lawsuit train.... Not to mention in Japan companies just don't get hauled over the coals like this... They thought they'd fight it.