Posted on 10/06/2025 7:05:32 AM PDT by Red Badger
A college student killed in a Tesla Cybertruck crash was trapped inside the vehicle as it burst into flames due to a design flaw involving its doors, a lawsuit has claimed.
Krysta Michelle Tsukahara, a sophomore at Savannah College of Art and Design, was one of three who died in the accident in Piedmont, California, last November.
Her parents have alleged that Tesla, run by Elon Musk, knew of the design flaw for years and could have fixed the problem but failed to do so.
Krysta, 19, along with friends Soren Dixon, 19, who was driving, and Jack Nelson, 20, died in the crash after the vehicle hit a tree at high speed and burst into flames. A fourth person was also injured.
Her parents Carl and Noelle Tsukahara originally filed a lawsuit going after the automaker in April, before filing an amended wrongful death suit this week.
The 36-page complaint claims that their daughter, who was sitting in the back of the car, suffered minor injuries but when the vehicle's battery caught fire she died from burns and smoke inhalation.
The doors of the vehicle are battery powered and can fail if the vehicle loses power.
The suit says Krysta was unable to escape the inferno due to the manual release on the door being too difficult to find.
According to the suit, the teenager 'suffered unimaginable pain and emotional distress', due to being stuck in the rear of the vehicle as it burned.
Her father spoke with The New York Times, who first reported on the suit, saying his daughter would still be alive had it not been so difficult to get out.
He also spoke with KTVU Fox 2, adding: 'Krysta was a bright, kind, and accomplished young woman with her whole life ahead of her.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I’m sorry but the back seat manual cable is impossible to find if you don’t know your way around that truck.
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.
Was it a design flaw to drive fast into a tree?
With cocaine and meth in their systems?.............
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:
“Whiskey bottles and brand new cars”
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.
Who, as a passenger riding in a car, doesn't download the manual and read it while the car is burning?
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?
Maybe they couldn’t get a signal.
Sarcasm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds as if the "emergency" release was an AFTERTHOUGHT installation.
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?
I keep a window breaker in my glove box just in case. It seems like a pretty basic tool everyone should have.
All cars with electric door latches, including Cybertrucks have manual door releases.
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.
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