In November 2024 a Tesla Cybertruck carrying four college students left the road in Piedmont, California at more than 80 mph, struck a tree and a retaining wall, and caught fire. The driver, Soren Dickson, 19, and Jack Nelson, 20, were killed. A friend who reached the wreck broke a window with a tree branch and pulled one passenger out. In the back seat, Krysta Tsukahara, 19, had survived the impact. She could not get out, and she died in the fire.
Two lawsuits have now been filed — by Krysta Tsukahara’s parents, Noelle and Carl Tsukahara, and separately by Jack Nelson’s family. Neither is primarily about the crash. Both are about one design decision: what happens to the doors when the power is gone.
What the manual release requires
The Cybertruck, like most Teslas, has electronic doors. There is no handle you pull; there is a button on the pillar that signals a motor to unlatch. When the fire cut power, the buttons stopped working.
Tesla does fit mechanical backups, and its own manual describes the rear one: lift the rubber mat out of the door pocket, find the cable underneath, pull the loop at its end forward, then push the door open. The front release is easier to reach. The Tsukahara filing calls the rear procedure complex and ineffective in an emergency, and argues that a teenager in a dark, filling-with-smoke cabin could not reasonably be expected to perform it. Jack Nelson’s family’s lawyer, Matthew Davis, told Bloomberg that two things can be true at once: the driver may bear responsibility for the crash, and Tesla may bear responsibility for the passengers being unable to leave it.
The more consequential allegation is about notice. The Tsukahara complaint asserts that Tesla had repeated and direct notice that its reliance on electronic doors created an entrapment risk, pointing to incidents documented by owners, bystanders and first responders in which occupants survived the crash forces and could not escape once power failed and fire followed. Whether that notice existed, and what Tesla did about it, is the question the litigation will actually turn on — a design can be lawful and still be negligent if its maker knew.
The regulator was already there
The lawsuits land on top of an open federal investigation. In September 2025 the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began examining roughly 175,000 Model Y vehicles from 2021 after complaints that the doors could not be opened — in several cases with children inside — when the low-voltage battery failed. NHTSA has logged more than 140 complaints about Tesla door problems since 2018.
Tesla has not commented on the suits. It has, though, conceded the underlying point commercially: the company’s design chief told Bloomberg that a door-handle redesign is under way, intended to make the releases intuitive for an occupant in what he described as a panic situation. That is an unusual thing to say while denying there is a problem.
Why this is not only a Tesla story
Electronic latches and flush handles are spreading across the industry, for reasons that are real rather than cosmetic: a flush surface cuts drag and therefore adds range, and a latch with no mechanical linkage is cheaper to build and easier to seal. Nearly every manufacturer using them now sells cars in markets including Bangladesh, where BYD and other Chinese brands have brought flush-handle designs to roads with slower emergency response than California’s.
Every one of those cars has a mechanical backup somewhere. The question the Tsukahara case puts to the whole industry is whether a backup you need the manual to find counts as a backup at all. Regulators have spent decades writing rules about how strongly a door must stay shut during a crash, because doors that fly open eject occupants. There is no comparable rule about how quickly a conscious, frightened passenger can get the same door open afterwards. Aviation settled that question long ago by making the exit obvious to a stranger in darkness and testing it with people who had never seen the aircraft. Cars have not been held to anything like it.
What an owner can do this week
Nothing here waits on a verdict. Find the manual release for every seat in your car, not just the driver’s — in many models the rear release is in a different place and works differently from the front. Operate it once, with the car parked, so your hands know where it is. Then show it to whoever sits in the back, which in most families means the people least likely to have read the manual and most likely to need it.
