Think of the children... I'm pretty sure that no kids were at risk of losing their fingers because of the Cams on the SHO. Interior items like seats that have poorly designed mechanisms are much easier to diagnose and treat, and create much more publicity.
Timing is also important. Granted, some recalls are issued many years after the fact, but when you create a stink about a car that's still being produced, GM knows that it's going to hurt sales if they don't do something about it. They'll probably only install this "guard" on 250k or 350k vehicles out of just under 600k.
The fix sounds like a $2 or $3 piece of plastic. The time involved is likely about 2 minutes plus documentation time. Then there's also the cost of notifying all consumers via snail-mail.
In any case, there are a lot of factors that go into a decision for a recall. A labor intensive repair on an issue that doesn't seem to surface until many thousands of miles on a small percentage of total vehicles produced will always take a back seat (no pun intended) to a highly visible, cheap, and non-time-consuming repair on a new vehicle.
Granted, some people have mentioned that FOMOCO supposedly knew about the cam problem for a long time internally, but that will be almost impossible to prove.
Unfortunately, the argument of "fewer vehicles, easier recall" doesn't necessarily follow when there's PR issues involved. It would be an insane challenge at this point in time for FOMOCO to locate all owners of 96-99 SHOs to the level that's usually required or warranted by a recall. If the car was ever sold through a non Ford dealer, and then self-serviced or serviced outside of Ford's hands, the owner is all but lost to FOMOCO. The youngest car is going on 4 years old in a SHO recall; the GM recall is on cars 3 years old up through brand new.
Safety, visibility, and cost of repair are the biggest factors in a recall. Unfortunately, the SHO cams strike out 1, 2, 3. I'm not trying to defend FOMOCO, but instead trying to offer a broader perspective on the issue.
[FLAME SUIT ON]
-John
