The parents of two college students from Piedmont who died in a fiery car crash last year sued Tesla on Thursday, claiming design flaws prevented the children from escaping the burning Cybertruck.
Krysta Tsukahara, 19, and Jack Nelson, 20, died in an early morning car crash in November, when the Cybertruck in which they was traveling struck a retaining wall and tree and burst into flames. The two young adults, who were sitting in the vehicle’s rear passenger seats, were unable to exit the vehicle and died in the resulting conflagration
The vehicle’s driver, 19-year-old Soren Dixon, also died, and a fourth occupant was rescued.
Tsukahara’s parents, Carl and Noelle Tsukahara, sued Dixon’s estate and the estate of the owner of the vehicle earlier this year as they attempted to get more information about their daughter’s death.
On Thursday, the couple added Tesla to their lawsuit, and Nelson’s parents filed their own suit. Both filings accuse the company of negligence and failing to address significant safety issues with the doors on its vehicles, making it impossible for the plaintiffs’ children to escape the blaze.
The car company’s doors are powered by a 12-volt battery. If a vehicle loses power during a crash, it can cause the electronic door mechanism to fail, according to the lawsuit, and the interior release is hidden and difficult to find.
The result, according to the twin lawsuits, was the agonizing and preventable death of their children.
“It’s just a horror story,” Tsukahara family attorney Roger Dreyer said, in an interview. “Tesla knows that it’s happened and that it’s going to happen, and they are doing nothing but selling the car with a system that entraps people and doesn’t provide a way of extraction.”
In an emailed statement, Nelson’s parents said the crash and the death of their son, Tsukahara and Dixon rippled far beyond their tightknit community in Piedmont.
“The four young people in the Cybertruck were close friends and outstanding individuals, each on the verge of making meaningful contributions to the world,” Todd Nelson and Stannye Nelson said. “They were all victims of Tesla’s unsafe design.”
Officials from Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. The company gained notoriety for its high-tech designs, including doors without handles that open or shut with the push of a button.
But that design made it susceptible to electrical failure during the collision, according to the lawsuit, and “lacked a functional, accessible, and conspicuous manual door release mechanism, fail-safe,” or other system to escape in case of emergency.
The Tsukaharas included more than 30 examples of publicized problems with Tesla’s door systems.
According to the Tsukahara’s filing, their daughter survived the Nov. 27 crash and was fully conscious but unable to escape the vehicle because the Cybertruck lost power in the crash and its electronic door release system failed. She died from smoke inhalation and burns after would-be rescuers were unable to pull her and the other occupants from the truck.
A witness following the Cybertruck used a tree branch to break the vehicle’s window, and managed to extract passenger Jordan Miller, who survived.
The wrongful death suits, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, allege that Tesla has long known about problems with its electric door systems, but that the company has shown a “conscious disregard” for the safety of consumers, such as Tsukahara.
The lawsuits seek unspecified punitive damages against Tesla. It is the latest blow for the motor vehicle company, which is under investigation by federal safety regulators, and for the Cybertruck, which has undergone more than half a dozen recalls and has seen plummeting sales over the past year.
In September, officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they were investigating the company after receiving complaints from owners of 2021 Model Y sport utility vehicles. In several cases, parents told the agency they couldn’t reopen the doors to get children out of the back seat, and in four incidents, adults had to smash windows to free them, officials reported.
The company has also been named in several other recent lawsuits over fatal crashes that customers say were caused by faulty designs or which Tesla was partly responsible for.
In August, a Florida jury found Tesla liable to pay more than $240 million to victims of a 2019 fatal crash of an Autopilot-equipped 2019 Model S, finding that the company’s software contributed to the accident. One person died in the crash, and another was seriously injured.
Last year, the company settled a separate lawsuit filed by the relatives of a man who died in a crash in 2016 in Indiana after they said he was unable to escape from the burning Model S Tesla in which he was a passenger.
The Chronicle previously reported that Dixon and the crash victims had alcohol, cocaine and other substances in their systems and that investigators from the California Highway Patrol determined impaired driving and speeding were factors in the crash.
Dreyer, the Tsukahara family attorney, said he believed he has a “very, very strong case” against Tesla.
“They will want to blame Mr. Dixon, anybody but themselves,” he said. “But this vehicle absolutely should not have entombed these individuals and my clients’ daughter. It’s our way of holding the wrongdoer accountable, and correcting bad conduct.”
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