The parents of two college students who died in a Cybertruck crash last fall are suing Tesla, alleging the truck’s door design trapped the victims inside.
Separate lawsuits filed Thursday by the families of 20-year-old Jack Nelson and 19-year-old Krysta Tsukahara claim that the Cybertruck’s design, including electric-powered doors with hidden manual releases, made it nearly impossible for the students to escape after the crash, according to Bloomberg.
The lawsuits come as Tesla’s signature electric door handles have already been under scrutiny in recent months. In September, U.S. regulators launched a probe into faulty door handles on certain Tesla models. And a Bloomberg investigation earlier this year also revealed multiple cases in which people were hurt or even died when Teslas lost power, typically after crashes, and their doors wouldn’t open.
This crash happened on the night of November 27, 2024, in Piedmont, a suburb of San Francisco. According to a California Highway Patrol report, the Cybertruck was speeding down a residential street when it slammed into a tree and burst into flames. The accident caused the truck’s electric doors to malfunction, trapping all four passengers inside. Three of them—Nelson, Tsukahara, and another passenger—did not survive. The fourth passenger survived after being pulled out through a broken window.
Tesla’s Cybertruck lacks traditional exterior door handles. Instead, doors open with small electronic buttons near the windows. There are manual releases inside the truck, but they are hard to find, especially for passengers in the back. To open the truck’s rear doors, riders have to lift up a mat in the door’s storage pocket and tug on a cable hidden underneath. Combined with the Cybertruck’s stainless steel panels and reinforced armor glass windows, which make rescue operations especially difficult, the lawsuits argue these design features are at fault for the passengers’ deaths.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.
The complaints land at a time when Tesla’s electric door handles are already under regulatory scrutiny. Just last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a preliminary investigation into failing door handles on 2021 Model Y vehicles after receiving several reports of parents being unable to get back inside their cars with children left trapped inside them. This probe covers nearly 175,000 cars and will assess whether the defect poses a serious safety risk.
Bloomberg’s investigation found that the NHTSA has received over 140 complaints since 2018 about Tesla doors sticking, not opening, or otherwise failing.