Cybertruck crash report says witness could not open door to save victims

A young man who tried to save his friends trapped in a raging Cybertruck fire could not manage to open the doors in time. 

That awful detail from a witness was provided in a report released by the California Highway Patrol this month about the crash that killed three college students in Piedmont last November. 

While the report does not conclude the stuck doors were the reason the students could not be saved, it introduces a potential technical issue that car engineering experts have previously warned as a safety risk. 

The crash occurred in the early morning hours of November 27, 2024, after the group was partying with friends at another house in the neighborhood. 

Earlier documents released by the CHP said speeding was a major factor in the collision. Those documents also showed that the driver was legally intoxicated. 

The latest report provides more details about what happened that night. 

The driver, 19-year-old Soren Dixon, “was unable to negotiate” the curvature of the street as he was speeding westbound on Hampton Road toward his friend’s house two blocks away, according to the “summary/cause” section of the report. He swerved out of the roadway and crashed into a retaining wall. the Cybertruck getting wedged between the wall and a tree. 

Jack Nelson, 20, and Krysta Tsukahara, 19, were in the back of the Cybertruck. Like Dixon, they asphyxiated in a fire that had exploded at the truck’s front hood after the collision. 

Another passenger in the truck, Jordan Miller, was rescued by a witness and friend of the victims who was driving in a separate car behind Dixon. That witness, whose name was redacted in the document released to The Oaklandside but who was identified by the East Bay News Group as Matt Riordan, was one of a handful of friends who were at the same party that night. 

Riordan and another witness caught up to the fiery Cybertruck only moments after the crash and immediately raced to help their friends, according to Riordan’s account in the CHP report. 

First, Riordan tried to pull a “mangled” front right door by sliding his fingers inside the crack, but “nothing budged at all,” he told investigators. He then tried to open the doors by pressing the electronic buttons of the doors, but they were not working. 

Riordan “attempted to punch the window to no avail” and grabbed a tree branch to bash the window. After he struck it 10 to 15 times,  the window cracked, allowing him to pull it out of its frame. He then pushed away the airbag that had deployed to pull a “barely conscious” Miller from the front right seat. After leaving Miller with the other witness, Riordan screamed at the other passengers to get out, but they were stuck in their seats as the fire grew. 

Tsukahara, seated in the back with Nelson, attempted to get out through the same front-right window but retreated when the fire continued to engulf the car. When Riordan was finally able to break through the back window, the fire had gotten so hot and large, he was unable to reach into the back to save them. The three college students died inside the car. 

It’s not yet known why Riordan could not open the Cybertruck’s doors. Photos of the scene show heavy structural damage to the doors, but it’s unclear if the damage was from the crash or from witnesses and first responders trying to open the doors. The CHP’s Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team (MAIT) is currently developing a supplemental report that will delve deeper into the causes of crash, and it’s not known when it will be completed.

Adam Cook, a Detroit robotics and car engineer who has worked for Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota building their safety and quality systems, told The Oaklandside that a root-cause analysis is needed to fully understand what happened in the Piedmont collision. But he noted that there have been published reports in the past few years of people who died inside Tesla vehicles because they couldn’t exit a damaged car or because bystanders could not open the doors.

The main issue is that the doors of a Tesla, as well as those of some other manufacturers’ electric vehicles, rely on electronic power “to disengage electronic latches,” the Detroit engineer said. The electronic design schemes rely on the car maintaining power to open the door instead of a simple mechanical latch. 

On the Cybertruck, this entry-and-exit issue may be worse, as there are emergency pull cords in “obscure locations which often require rear seat passengers to remove door paneling to access,” Cook said in an email. This mechanism is described in the owner’s manual of both the Cybertruck and the Model Y vehicles. 

“If vehicle power was lost, I am not sure how the Cybertruck doors can be actuated from outside of the vehicle. My suspicion is that they cannot,” Cook said.

Cook also said that issues around the Cybertruck and other new car designs come about because the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards “under-specifies” safety standards for vehicle entry (commonly described in car engineering as ingress) and exit (egress). These standards should in theory minimize the risk of injury in both normal and emergency conditions by defining the highest possible level of safety design of the door, the step height, the quality of the door grab handles, visibility, and emergency exits. 

“Combined with the ‘self-certification’ contract that exists between US auto regulators and manufacturers, it is effectively left up to Tesla to design their door actuation systems and any emergency-access systems related to that,” Cook said. 

Cook suggested that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) independently investigate incidents like the one in Piedmont to better understand the root cause of the issue. 

It’s not the first time the Cybertruck’s safety has been called into question. Since it was released, questions about its accelerator, its drive-by-wire suspension, its performance during collisions have all been criticized by professional car engineers and auto safety experts. Just this week, Tesla issued a recall for 2024 model Cybertrucks due to a pedal assembly that can dislodge when “high force is applied.”