Nightmarish final moments of wealthy student, 19, killed alongside two friends trapped in burning Tesla Cybertruck revealed

Daily Mail UK ^ | October 03, 2025 | JOE HUTCHISON,

[Abecus]

I’m sorry but the back seat manual cable is impossible to find if you don’t know your way around that truck.

[SmokingJoe]

If you are high on Jack Daniels and drugs (as these people were), you couldn't really find much of anything after crashing into a tree could you?

[Blueflag]

Agree. It’s easy to use the front seat ones, but I’m guessing the rear ones might have been ‘hidden’ for child safety reasons.

I had to read the online manual to learn how to use the rear ones.

Ford has this right- on the inside all the Lightning door handles are like every other F150.

[packrat35]

Was it a design flaw to drive fast into a tree?

[Red Badger]

With cocaine and meth in their systems?.............

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Is it possible he read the manual and forgot the instructions? Or panicked?

It's possible. He definitely panicked. He tried everything to break the glass, even going so far as banging his head on the glass.

On the C6 Corvettes the manual release is on the sill, next to the driver/passenger seats.

Here's a photo of it. The passenger door has the same type of release. They're not hidden.

Here's the manual door release(s) for the CyberTruck. I can see that since the back door release is hidden under two pop-off plastic panels, which IMO, is problematic because it's not obvious, like with the Corvettes' release.

Front:

Back:

[shotgun]

“Whiskey bottles and brand new cars”

[T.B. Yoits]

Who buys a car, then doesn't read the manual?

Who rents a car an doesn't read the manual? - almost everybody

Car manufacturers have had standards for a century, including door handles. Users of a product have a reasonable expectation of things to follow such standards. Tesla designers chose to deviate from such standards and people died.

[Fresh Wind]

Who buys a car, then doesn't read the manual?

Who, as a passenger riding in a car, doesn't download the manual and read it while the car is burning?

[lastchance]

And that should 100% play any part in assigning fault if it goes to court. Yes, I agree that it is very fortunate there were no other deaths. But the article does not read that they had all been impaired. Any means of egress should be easy to find and easy to operate,even if a person is not in the best of conditions. So the question remains, did the design of the locks and lever prevent anyone from being able to get out of the car?

[lastchance]

Maybe they couldn’t get a signal.

Sarcasm.

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Who rents a car an doesn't read the manual? - almost everybody

It's pretty easy to tell if any car, owned or rented has an E-latch. If you pull a lever to get out, it's manual. If you push a button, it's electric.

I haven't rented a car with an electric latch, but you can bet if I did I'd look up where to find the manual release.

Car manufacturers have had standards for a century, including door handles. Users of a product have a reasonable expectation of things to follow such standards. Tesla designers chose to deviate from such standards and people died.

Standards change. At one time the cars to which you refer, had no crush zones, metal dashboards, no seat belts and no safety glass. Modern cars that have electric door latches always have a mechanical back-up.

Let's keep in mind that these folks got drunk and high, then got into the vehicle and crashed into a tree at high speeds. The driver had a BAC of .195, over twice the legal limit.

I'll bet the girl's parents aren't suing the driver's parents even though he was drunk, high and speeding.

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Who, as a passenger riding in a car, doesn't download the manual and read it while the car is burning?

Perhaps the owner should have read the manual so he could inform the passenger(s) about how to exit the vehicle in an emergency?

Nah! That would require some personal responsibility and we all know that idea is passé.

Let's just sue the deepest pockets, instead.

[VideoDoctor]

Why does it matter that the student was “wealthy”? That part of the headline seems like it has no relevance to the story.

Another REMINDER of how "PI$$ POOR" today's SUPPOSED journalists write... it's also PROOF of how far up their OWN A$$ their head is.

[T.B. Yoits]

They were rear seat passengers and apparently alive after the crash.

The drunk driver put them in that situation but the Cybertruck designers trapped them there.

Compare it to a fire in a building. Yes, the person who caused the building fire is at fault but you would have been alive if not for a fire exit door that doesn't have the standard push latch because the designers wanted to hide a release behind a panel somewhere and you, a building occupant and not the owner with the manual, can't figure it out before perishing in the blaze. (Along similar lines, in a building fire, locked doors are automatically unlocked once the alarms are triggered. That is not the case in the design of the Cybertruck).

There's no mechanical or structural justification to omit a manual door release in the design of the Cybertruck. It was for aesthetics only and as shown, deadly.

The crash is on the driver. The deaths are on the designers and engineers at Tesla.

[VideoDoctor]

“use the manual release mechanism instead of the interior button. For the front doors, pull up the manual door release located in front of the window switches. For the rear doors, remove the rubber mat from the bottom of the door pocket to find a plastic flap, then pull the mechanical release cable forward to open the door”

Sounds as if the "emergency" release was an AFTERTHOUGHT installation.

[House Atreides]

Design flaw? Lots of people die in automobile accidents for reasons that could be attributed (mainly by negligence plaintiff attorneys) to “design flaws”. For example, a car with powered windows accidentally ends up in a body of water and the window opener’s power fails trapping the occupants in the sinking car. Design flaw?

[Tacrolimus1mg]

I keep a window breaker in my glove box just in case. It seems like a pretty basic tool everyone should have.

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

There's no mechanical or structural justification to omit a manual door release in the design of the Cybertruck. It was for aesthetics only and as shown, deadly.

All cars with electric door latches, including Cybertrucks have manual door releases.

[Paal Gulli]

As of 2023, 83 people had been killed in Tesla battery fires.

Only 27 people were burned to death in Ford Pinto fuel tank explosions.

It’s (regrettable but) understandable when a liquid hydrocarbon fuel catches fire in a crash and burns people to death. When an electrical storage battery does the same, ... not so much.

Gasoline can leak harmlessly. With a (Tesla’s) 400-amp storage battery, there’s no such thing as a “non-lethal” leak. Execution chamber electric chairs typically are 7 - 12 amps.