By BERNARD CONDON
The parents of two college students killed in a Tesla crash say they were trapped in the car as it burst into flames because of a design flaw that made it nearly impossible for them to open the doors, according to lawsuits filed Thursday.
The parents of Krysta Tsukahara and her friend, Jack Nelson, allege that the company that helped Elon Musk become the world’s richest man knew about the flaw for years and could have moved faster to fix the problem but did not, leaving the two trapped amid flames and smoke that eventually killed them.
Tesla did not reply to a request for comment.
The new legal threats to Tesla filed in Alameda County Superior Court come just weeks after federal regulators opened an investigation into complaints by Tesla drivers of problems with stuck doors. The probe and suit come at a delicate time for the company as it seeks to convince Americans that its cars will soon be safe enough to ride in without anyone in the driver’s seat.
Tsukahara, 19, and Nelson, 20, were in the back of a Cybertruck in November 2024 when the driver, drunk and on drugs, smashed into a tree in the San Francisco suburb of Piedmont, California, according to the suits. The driver also died. A fourth passenger was pulled from the car after a rescuer broke a window and reached in.
The Tsukahara lawsuit was first reported by The New York Times.
Tesla doors have been at the center of several crash cases because the battery powering the unlocking mechanism can be destroyed in a fire and the manual releases that override that system are difficult to find.
The lawsuit follows several others that have claimed various safety problems with Tesla cars. In August, a Florida jury decided that the family of another dead college student, this one killed by a runaway Tesla years ago, should be awarded more than $240 million in damages.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which opened its stuck-door investigation last month, is looking into complaints by drivers that after exiting their cars, they couldn’t open back doors to get their children out and, in some cases, had to break the window to reach them.
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