About 10 months after a fiery Cybertruck crash in Piedmont killed three college students, two of their families are suing Tesla with allegations that the electric vehicle’s rear door design turned a survivable collision into a deadly disaster.
The tragic crash plunged the sleepy Bay Area city into mourning last November. As SFGATE reported, a passerby managed to pull one survivor out of the burning car before police arrived. But Soren Dixon — later found to have been driving with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.195% — and rear passengers Krysta Tsukahara and Jack Nelson didn’t escape the vehicle. Each died of smoke inhalation; they were class of 2023 Piedmont High School grads, back in the Bay Area from college for Thanksgiving break.
Tsukahara’s family had already filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Dixon’s estate in Alameda County Superior Court. But on Thursday, they added Tesla to the same complaint, and Nelson’s family filed a suit of their own. Each says that the respective victims survived the initial crash but that the Cybertruck’s electric door systems shut down, meaning Tsukahara and Nelson would have had to find the “mechanical release cable” tucked under a rubber mat at the bottom of each door to escape.
Tsukahara’s lawsuit includes a list of 34 occasions where people expressed concern about their Teslas’ door systems, meant to rebut a statement from CEO Elon Musk in 2013 in which he said “door-handle incidents have gone virtually to zero.” It also linked to a recent Bloomberg investigation, which pointed out that battery cells burn intensely, once caught, and said, “flush door handles, electrical power, mechanical releases” are “flummoxing occupants and first responders.” SFGATE reported in June on basketball phenom Alijah Arenas’ harrowing escape from a Cybertruck whose doors wouldn’t open.
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