IIRC, under the aegis of seatbelt laws some states impounded cars that didn't get a critical safety-related recall due an issue with the Toyota automated seatbelts of the late 80s/early 90s.

Issues like that often end up with class action suits to deal with corporate liability issues, it's not all personal liability either.

Maybe that's still too "one time for one particular issue" to easily dismiss the flaws in your analogy. What about emissions-related recalls?

Some states still have ongoing vigorous emissions testing requirements and some of those requirements include checking for emissions-related recalls. Failures are sometimes impounded, almost always disallowed permits/registrations to use of the roads.

One of the largest scandals of which should still be in recent memory, "Dieselgate", where VW was forced at great expense to recall entire models of cars that would not be allowed on the roads of all states that followed US EPA laws. Which the US federal government led a lawsuit (which included several states as additional complaintants) against VW for the problem, and leveraged a massive corporate liability fine. VW had to work to buy back all the recalled vehicle models, and had to do massive corporate restructuring in response to the US provided mandates that they accepted in lieu of fine payment.

Your car analogy is over-simplified, even if it is not entirely wrong.