When sheriff deputies arrived on the scene of a late-night crash off a desolate Texas street in August 2024, they might see a large pyre by way of heavy smoke.
Based on police experiences detailing the occasions of that night time, the officers tried to method the car, however the hearth burned too intensely. They noticed it was a Tesla Cybertruck and couldn’t see anybody inside. So that they combed the encircling space for the motive force.
As flames leapt greater than 10ft excessive, one deputy tried to make use of his hearth extinguisher to fight the blaze, to no avail. When firefighters arrived, they tapped right into a hydrant – however quelling the hearth within the electrical car took time. The truck’s batteries saved reigniting.
As soon as the blaze was lastly out, officers cautiously inspected the Cybertruck. That’s once they found human stays.
“The physique inside was severely burnt and was utterly unidentifiable,” one officer wrote in his report. “You would see a pelvic backbone and ribcage laying throughout the entrance two seats, principally within the passenger seat,” one other wrote.
Within the aftermath of the fiery scene, officers discovered paperwork scattered close to the car on which was the identify Michael Patrick Sheehan. He was a 47-year-old nurse practitioner who had owned the Cybertruck for simply three months. As his widow and oldsters work to uncover what absolutely occurred, a take a look at different circumstances bearing the identical grim hallmarks would possibly present clues.
The blaze in Baytown, Texas, was one in all 5 recognized Cybertruck fires that the Guardian has tracked – a big quantity, contemplating the car has solely offered 60,000 items and debuted simply two years in the past. These incidents contain 4 fatalities, together with the deaths of three school college students in California, and have been the topic of three wrongful demise lawsuits in opposition to Tesla. In a complete take a look at hearth hazard, significantly of Cybertrucks, the Guardian has obtained lots of of pages of police, hearth and post-mortem experiences and court docket filings and firm manuals, in addition to interviewed attorneys and security consultants. They – in addition to the households suing Tesla – allege the Cybertruck’s design led to those worst-case eventualities the place fires quickly ignite, the car’s electrical door handles gained’t unlock and passengers are trapped inside.
“He burned to demise at 5,000°F – a hearth so scorching his bones skilled thermal fracture,” reads the grievance from Sheehan’s household. The lawsuit contends Sheehan might have survived the crash, if he had been capable of open the doorways and escape the blaze, which flared to temperatures hotter than most cremation ovens. “The crash forces themselves had been survivable,” the attorneys wrote.
Fires that entrap passengers are a well-documented and recurring drawback with each mannequin in Tesla’s lineup of automobiles, however Cybertrucks seem to have a disproportionate variety of recognized deaths. Security consultants have advised the Guardian that the truck’s distinctive design amplifies the lethal difficulty. The automobiles include high-density laminated home windows which might be more durable to interrupt than common automobile home windows, making escape and rescue tough when doorways gained’t unlock. And the vans are constructed with supplies not generally used within the business, like chrome steel, which may complicate the work of emergency responders. The Cybertruck can also be the primary Tesla mannequin to completely get rid of door handles on the surface of the car.
The hulking trapezoidal vehicles are a ardour venture for Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. Regardless of having been topic to 10 remembers, most notably over defective accelerators that might stick at full throttle, Musk continuously praises the Cybertruck, calling it an “unimaginable car” and “our greatest ever from Tesla”. He says the vans are “apocalypse-proof” and claims they will stand up to bullets and have “armor glass” home windows.
“Vehicles ought to be manly. They need to be macho,” Musk advised podcaster Joe Rogan in an October interview. “And bulletproof is most macho.”
Michael Brooks, the chief director of the non-profit Middle for Auto Security, sees these traits in another way: “A whole lot of it’s this whiz-bang, cool tech options which may look actually cool and would possibly promote automobiles, however it’s like they didn’t do the backup human-factors analysis … to see how they might perform in safety-critical incidents.”
Tesla didn’t return a number of requests for remark. In court docket filings, it has denied any wrongdoing and mentioned the Cybertruck is compliant with federal security requirements and the corporate has happy its obligation to warn clients concerning the dangers and risks of utilizing its product.
Thermal runaway
Final April, simply earlier than dawn, firefighters responded to experiences of an uncontrolled blaze in a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles. They arrived at a paradoxical scene by which a crumpled Cybertruck engulfed in flames was being showered by a hearth hydrant spewing water 50ft into the air. Laying within the water-soaked avenue was Alijah Arenas, an 18-year-old basketball star for the College of Southern California.
He’d been rescued from contained in the burning Cybertruck after passersby labored to peel again one of many truck’s home windows and pull him out. Due to extreme smoke inhalation, although, Arenas needed to be briefly positioned in a medically induced coma.
The basketball participant later recounted the crash throughout a June press convention, saying he was driving residence from the fitness center when the steering wheel grew to become unresponsive. Unable to manage the Cybertruck, he careened into the hearth hydrant and a tree. Trying again on the digicam feed, he mentioned the car caught hearth upon influence.
“I get up within the automobile after about three minutes,” Arenas mentioned. “I had heard cracking noises like I used to be at a campfire.”
Arenas mentioned it felt like an overheated sauna, and the passenger-side dashboard was on hearth. The smoke was so thick, he couldn’t see outdoors. He tried opening the doorways, however they wouldn’t budge. “I begin form of panicking and speeding to get out,” he mentioned. He handed out as soon as, then awakened. To remain awake, he bit his lips and dug his fingernails into his palms and began kicking a window working to get free. The window was barely open and he might hear somebody making an attempt to interrupt by way of it from the surface. Then he handed out once more.
“It felt like I used to be in there for a pair hours, and it was solely a pair minutes,” Arenas mentioned.
When electrical automobiles catch on hearth, they burn a lot quicker and warmer than gas-powered automobiles. If the inner cells in lithium-ion batteries turn into overheated, they will shortly combust in an uncontrollable domino-like impact. The time period for the phenomenon, which may occur when there’s bodily harm to the batteries, is “thermal runaway”. Battery fires additionally attain a lot larger temperatures than gasoline fires, making it simpler for different elements of the car to ignite.
“We’ve this new world of electrical automobiles and many of the security knowledge means that the automobiles are as secure as inside combustion engines and don’t elevate distinctive issues,” mentioned Ann Carlson, a former appearing administrator of the Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration and College of California, Los Angeles regulation professor. “However clearly, the batteries – once they catch on hearth – are totally different.”
All the 5 Cybertruck fires the Guardian has tracked burned with extreme depth. Two resulted in fatalities, and it was a close to miss with Arenas. Two of the incidents didn’t contain hurt to people. One in Harlingen, Texas, occurred when a Cybertruck struck a hearth hydrant, burst into flames and burned for hours. The opposite concerned a Cybertruck towing a wooden chipper in rural Colorado that caught hearth and almost began a brush hearth – it took 30 firefighters to place out the blaze.
Tesla’s emergency response information for Cybertrucks says “massive quantities of water” should be utilized on to the battery to battle a hearth – between 3,000 and eight,000 gallons for one car battery. The corporate warns “there may be all the time a danger of battery re-ignition”.
Based on a report from the Los Angeles hearth division, Arenas’s Cybertruck battery caught hearth after which lit up the engine, suspension and wheels. The copious quantity of water ejecting out of the broken hearth hydrant did little to halt the blaze. Firefighters saved dousing the wrecked car till it could possibly be faraway from the scene. However after taking it to the tow yard, it exploded into flames once more, in keeping with the Los Angeles Instances.
Arenas spent six days within the hospital and recovered with out main accidents. His father, former NBA participant Gilbert Arenas, mentioned in a podcast interview that he believes the crash was as a result of Cybertruck malfunctioning, which was made worse when his son couldn’t escape.
“In case you are a father or mother and your teen has this automobile, you could need to put a hammer in that joint,” Arenas mentioned. “One thing that might break the window.”
Trapped inside a Cybertruck
When Tesla designed its first automobile within the early 2000s, Musk was deeply concerned within the particulars. One aspect he insisted on was retractable electrical door handles that sit flush with the automobile physique. The Roadster, Tesla’s first car, initially had latching handles like different automobiles, however Musk wished one thing glossy that would open with a contact.
“They saved asking me why I used to be being so hardcore about each little curve of this automobile,” Musk advised his biographer Walter Isaacson within the guide Elon Musk. “And what I advised them was, ‘As a result of we’ve to make it stunning.’”
Many years later, greater than 100 incidents have been recorded within the US exhibiting that when one thing cuts Tesla’s electrical system, doorways can lock and lure folks inside. Bloomberg has tracked greater than 140 shopper complaints about Tesla’s locking door handles since 2018, a interval throughout which Tesla offered round 3m automobiles. When doorways lock, first responders on the surface haven’t any straightforward means of getting in. And for passengers inside, the emergency manual-release levers – used to open doorways when energy is misplaced – might be laborious to find, in keeping with security consultants.
Brooks, from the Middle for Auto Security, mentioned most producers have an intuitive mechanism to unlock doorways from the within throughout an emergency. Some automobiles open when somebody pulls the door deal with twice, and others work when somebody yanks the deal with additional laborious.
“These are motions of an individual who’s making an attempt to flee,” Brooks mentioned. “In Teslas, that doesn’t work, you must discover the guide launch location to open the door.”
That guide launch, which is detailed within the proprietor’s guide, is totally different in every Tesla mannequin. The releases haven’t all the time been marked, however now the corporate is beginning to add an open-door icon to the mechanism in a few of its automobiles. Based on an investigation by Bloomberg, the lever might be hidden inside door panels or speaker grills and beneath flooring mats.
In Cybertrucks, the entrance door launch is a lever by the window switches, and within the again, it’s contained in the door pocket. To open the rear door, somebody must take away the rubber mat on the backside of the door pocket, then find and pull a cable contained in the door inside, in keeping with Tesla’s emergency response information. From outdoors the car, the information doesn’t provide any methodology to open Cybertruck doorways, as a substitute saying, “Extrication could also be required.”
This technique proved deadly for a bunch of Bay Space mates in November 2024. It was after midnight when Soren Dixon, residence from school and partying with mates, determined to take his grandfather’s Cybertruck for a trip. As he sped by way of the hilly city of Piedmont with three passengers, one other buddy, Matthew Riordan, drove alongside behind. For causes nonetheless unknown, Dixon’s Cybertruck plowed right into a tree at round 58mph and instantly ignited, in keeping with witnesses and a California freeway patrol investigation.
Riordan jumped out of his automobile and ran to the chaotic smoke-filled scene, making an attempt unsuccessfully to open the Cybertruck’s doorways, in keeping with lawsuit complaints and interviews with household attorneys. He might see his mates inside, determined to get out. Riordan grabbed a tree department and began hammering on a entrance aspect window.
“It’s not like one strike, he mentioned it took 10 to fifteen strikes with this very massive department,” mentioned Roger Dreyer, a lawyer representing the household of one of many victims, Krysta Tsukahara, in a lawsuit in opposition to Tesla. “And you’ll think about, simply the extent of adrenaline and endorphins that had been firing on this younger man, and the way laborious he was hitting on these home windows. These had been his easiest mates.”
Riordan was capable of rescue one buddy from the entrance after which tried to drag Tsukahara, who was screaming for assist, from the again, in keeping with the grievance. As Riordan reached for her, they grasped palms, however the hearth flared they usually needed to retreat. Riordan began banging on the again window with the department, Dreyer mentioned, and tried to peel away the glass together with his naked palms.
“The fireplace was completely an inferno,” Dreyer mentioned. “There was no means, humanly, he might keep there.”
Tsukahara, together with Dixon and a 3rd buddy, Jack Nelson, didn’t survive. Based on post-mortem experiences, none of them had blunt pressure accidents from the influence of the crash. As a substitute, the experiences word, they died of asphyxia from smoke inhalation and extreme “thermal accidents”.
Matthew Davis, a lawyer representing Nelson’s household in a lawsuit in opposition to Tesla, mentioned there isn’t a means passengers are going to know the way to manually open doorways in a hearth. And, he alleged, the dearth of an intuitive escape mechanism is a significant design flaw.
“The children bear accountability for the crash … They get in a car, or drive a car, once they’re intoxicated. That’s inexcusable,” Davis mentioned. “However after they crashed, it’s inexcusable that they couldn’t get out. And that’s Tesla’s fault.”
In court docket filings, Tesla places the blame on the group of mates, saying they had been negligent and “knowingly and voluntarily positioned themselves in an unsafe and harmful place and due to this fact assumed the entire ensuing dangers of accidents”.
The corporate has indicated, nevertheless, that it’s trying into the door deal with difficulty. Franz von Holzhausen, the chief designer for Tesla, advised Bloomberg in a September podcast that the corporate was engaged on a mechanism to open doorways if energy is misplaced. “The thought of mixing the digital one and the guide one collectively into one button, I feel, makes loads of sense,” he mentioned. “You intuitively simply seize the identical factor, and also you’re free.”
Tesla additionally revamped its security web page in December, including a brand new part about “safer aftermath”. The corporate now says its doorways will robotically unlock throughout a critical collision. Security consultants say that even when the doorways are unlocked, it will possibly nonetheless be unimaginable to make use of Tesla’s door handles with out energy, since there’s no latch to actuate.
The corporate didn’t reply to questions on whether or not these modifications are in impact or when they are going to be made out there.
Investigations and lawsuits in opposition to Tesla pile up
Cybertrucks rating excessive rankings on the subject of crash checks. The Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration (NHTSA) gave the automobiles 5 stars in total security for the previous two years. The fires tracked by the Guardian present passengers didn’t undergo extreme accidents from the impacts of the crashes. However security consultants say that on the subject of egress – with the ability to get out of a car after a crash – Cybertrucks might be harmful.
The NHTSA hasn’t but developed requirements for egress, so it’s not factored into security checks. After the Piedmont crash, the company mentioned it was gathering info from Tesla and regulation enforcement however stopped in need of opening an investigation. The company did, nevertheless, open current investigations into Tesla’s electrical door handles for its 2022 Mannequin 3 and 2021 Mannequin Y sedans. Regulators in Europe and China have gone a step additional with plans to tighten guidelines round flush door handles.
Lawsuits in opposition to Tesla involving entrapment in its sedans have additionally piled up, with circumstances introduced in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Washington. A Massachusetts wrongful demise go well with filed final month concerned a 20-year-old man who died after being trapped in a Mannequin Y that caught hearth.
“How might Tesla maintain promoting automobiles that they know lure folks inside their automobiles after a crash? They might have fastened it, however they refused,” Jacquelyn Tremblett, the sufferer’s mom, mentioned in an announcement. “Now my son is useless after struggling unmercifully.”
Tesla has fewer Cybertrucks on the street than sedans, however the vans seem to have the next price of recognized deaths from entrapment. The corporate’s sedans are the top-selling electrical automobiles within the US market, with greater than 350,000 Mannequin Y items offered in 2025. That’s in contrast with fewer than 60,000 Cybertrucks ever offered, in keeping with Kelley Blue Guide, with annual gross sales halving from 2024 to 2025.
Bloomberg tracked a minimum of 15 individuals who’ve died in Teslas over the previous decade after being trapped. At the very least 4 of these fatalities occurred in Cybertrucks. And an investigation by the Washington Submit analyzed a minimum of a dozen circumstances since 2019 by which folks had been unable to open Tesla doorways throughout fires, two of which concerned Cybertrucks. With the 5 Cybertruck fires that the Guardian has tracked, a minimum of three concerned car entrapment.
Complaints have been lodged in opposition to Rivian, Volkswagen, Ford, Fisker and Dodge over their electrical door handles too, which have imitated Tesla’s aesthetic. There isn’t a compilation of what number of complaints these producers have acquired, nevertheless, making a direct comparability with Cybertrucks difficult.
The NHTSA maintains the database of shopper complaints for automobiles offered within the US. A spokesperson for the company mentioned it’s conscious of all of the Cybertruck fires detailed by the Guardian and “is in contact with the producer”. The spokesperson added that “the company frequently analyzes shopper complaints to find out whether or not a possible car security defect exists and won’t hesitate to behave to guard public security”.
The Baytown crash
Within the days after the late-night crash in Baytown, Texas, authorities started to piece collectively what occurred. They decided Sheehan had been consuming at an area bar and was intoxicated. After 1am, he hopped into his Cybertruck and sped down that lone darkish street. Simply after an intersection, he veered off-course, hit a concrete culvert and flipped the truck.
There are nonetheless unknowns that could possibly be revealed as his household’s lawsuit works its means by way of the courts. Their attorneys have requested information from Tesla for all digicam, sensor and car motion knowledge to determine why the Cybertruck crashed and why Sheehan was unable to flee. Tesla has been combating to switch the case to non-public arbitration, and has refused to show over this documentation till the arbitration matter is determined.
In authorized filings, the corporate has mentioned Sheehan’s personal negligence contributed to his demise and has known as the household’s requests for extra info on the crash “dilatory” and “futile”, saying the case doesn’t belong in open court docket.
Attorneys for Sheehan’s widow and oldsters are adamant they’re entitled to those information, which they are saying might present important particulars concerning the ultimate moments of their beloved one’s life.
