From what I understand, it's not so much a design flaw as a production flaw; they made a change in manufacturing. They used a different chemical for something at some stage and that's what caused the pedal cover to slip off.
This was a failure of process.
I assure you, every major manufacturer in the world is either in the process of examining their processes to make sure that this particular issue isn't going to affect them, or has already done so. (I'm willing to bet that, in most cases, the investigation consisted of confirming that they don't use the chemical in question, along with some kind of "...because we're not idiots" notation in corporatese.)
What a lot of people don't appreciate is that corporate bureaucracy exists for a reason. Bureaucracy is the corporate equivalent of legislation-- every layer of it was born in red ink. As someone who has managed software deployments in production environment on systems used by millions of people each day, let me tell you, every step in that process is necessary. Oh, sure, it might seem like a lot of rigamarole for a minor change, but the problem is that people are notoriously bad at judging what a minor change is. I have personally been frustrated by a two-hour process (preceded by a week of paperwork, meetings, and approvals) to make a change in production that I knew full well would have no impact that, in actuality, took seven seconds and didn't require the traffic routing, load testing, etc. And I was right, it went without a hitch. Then two days later I spent fourteen hours on a call where half the system was down and it turned out that someone made a very similar change, and didn't say anything the entire time because he honestly didn't see how what he did caused what happened. "It shouldn't have affected anything!" If he'd followed process, there would have been no impact at all.
These tech bros think that they can revolutionize an industry by "streamlining the process" when they don't understand that the existing processes are the streamline. Sure, if they'd taken a week to test the impact of the change in process, it would have cost them a week, but it's gonna take more than a week to collect the information necessary to find out how much money this cost them. It's not just the cost of the recall and repair, it's the immediate impact this is going to have on sales, the long-term impact on consumer confidence in the brand, and, of course, a stock chart that looks like this:
That is a bad chart. And it's not going to get better.
