Humans react very irrationally even with training. It's easy to sit in your chair and say someone did the wrong thing.
They stepped on the wrong pedal, it's that simple. Oh, and they weren't an American car company.
Did you read the article?
> Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals... Investigators discovered internal Toyota documents that acknowledged serious problems with its vehicles.
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.