Bought by hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, Tesla SUVs, sedans, and Cybertrucks are considered a status symbol by electric vehicle enthusiasts and Elon Musk supporters.

However, the polarizing vehicles have garnered attention for negative reasons recently, with reports of alarming crashes and legal issues troubling the multi-trillion dollar company.

Last year, approximately five million Teslas were recalled—more than any other manufacturer in the US in 2024—due to problems such as electrical malfunctions, fluid leaks, and fire hazards.

Then in March this year, almost all of the Cybertrucks sold by Tesla—totaling 46,000, significantly less than the one million Musk aimed for—were recalled due to collision concerns.

Introduced in 2023, the truck’s angular design and stainless exoskeleton are among its futuristic design elements—the vehicle’s doors and tailgate automatically open via a mobile app.

Tesla occupants open the doors from inside by pressing a button rather than using traditional handles. However, the buttons become inoperable when the car loses power. In such instances, manual door releases—switches in the front doors and release cables hidden in the back doors—provide the only means of exit.

Retractable outer door handles on Tesla SUVs and sedans also depend on battery power. When those fail due to lack of charge or an emergency like a collision, it can have fatal consequences.

Passengers in Teslas – which are often used as Uber or Lyft vehicles in big cities – are unlikely to have any idea how to operate the emergency door release. 

In addition to door issues, lawsuits over the years have alleged the dangers of lithium-ion batteries going into ‘thermal runaway’ if damaged in a crash. That has been described as a ‘chain reaction’ which can cause a powerful inferno, which would take many hours to extinguish. 

A hidden manual override 

A college student who was killed in a Tesla Cybertruck crash in 2024 was trapped inside the vehicle as it burst into flames due to a door design flaw, a lawsuit claimed.

Krysta Michelle Tsukahara, 19, was one of three teenagers in the vehicle when it smashed into a tree at high speed in Piedmont, California, last November.

Tsukahara, a second-year student at Savannah College of Art and Design, along with friends Soren Dixon, 19, who was driving, and Jack Nelson, 20, were all killed in the crash after the vehicle caught fire. 

A fourth passenger was injured but survived. 

Tsukahara’s parents have since launched legal action, alleging that Tesla knew about the design flaw for years but failed to fix it. 

According to the suit, Tsukahara initially suffered only minor injuries, but when the Cybertruck’s battery ignited, she died from burns and smoke inhalation. 

The complaint highlights that the vehicle’s battery-powered doors can fail if the power cuts out, and that Tsukahara was unable to escape because the manual release was too difficult to locate.

Design flaws

In June, Tesla was sued by the estates of three people killed last year when their Model S crashed on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway.

David Dryerman, 54, was driving his 2024 Tesla along the Garden State Parkway with his wife, Michele, and 17-year-old daughter, Brooke, when he veered off the road.

The car slammed into a guardrail and concrete block, killing the parents and their daughter.

The couple’s son, 19-year-old Max, was not in the car at the time. The devastating crash left him an orphan.

The family had been on their way home from the See. Hear. Now. Festival in New Jersey at the time of the tragedy – Max was at college.

State Police Sgt Charles Marchan said the Tesla first struck a sign, then a guardrail before ultimately colliding with the nearby concrete bridge support.

The wrongful death lawsuit filed in the federal court in Camden, New Jersey, attributed the deaths to the car’s ‘defective and unreasonably dangerous design.’ 

The car was equipped with autopilot and full self-driving features.

A fireball crash

Earlier this month, a young Florida woman died after her Tesla Model 3 crashed and became engulfed in flames.

Julie Eibinder, 24, was driving along a six-lane road in North Miami Beach on October 1 when she was cut off by an SUV driver traveling in the same direction.

The vehicles collided before Eibinder’s Tesla struck a pole and erupted into flames, WTVJ reported.

Bodycam video shows how officers ran toward the wreck and tried to control the blaze until rescuers arrived.

An officer desperately beat on the rear windows with a baton, trying to break the glass, while another used a fire extinguisher.

They were unsuccessful, and by the time firefighters arrived on scene, the Tesla had erupted into a ball of fire.

Crews managed to put out the blaze, but by that point, Eibinder was already dead. 

A trapped driver in a sinking car

Angela Chao, a shipping industry CEO and sister-in-law of Senator Mitch McConnell, drowned when she accidentally reversed her Tesla Model X into a pond in February last year.

The billionaire heiress had been drinking with friends and was intoxicated when she got behind the wheel of her SUV at her sprawling Texas ranch and attempted a three-point turn.

Putting it into reverse, Chao failed to stop the car as it lurched over the top of the limestone block wall and into the water. 

Five minutes after she had entered the car, Chao called a friend to tell her ‘she had driven her vehicle into the pond’ and couldn’t get out, according to the law enforcement incident report. 

A friend, Amber Keinan, told detectives that Chao called her at 11.42 pm and said the car was in the water and she was trapped inside. The conversation lasted 8 minutes as the car slowly sank. 

‘Chao told Keinan the water was rising and she was going to die and said “I love you,”‘ the report read. ‘Chao then said her goodbyes to Keinan.’ 

Friends alerted authorities and even kayaked and swam to the car, climbing on top of it to try to reach Chao, officials stated. 

Just after midnight, some 20 minutes after the car entered the water, deputies arrived.

Their attempts to break the front windshield were unsuccessful, and after multiple attempts they eventually broke the driver-side window, the report said.

Emergency responders were also said to have been fearful that the battery-powered car may have posed an electrocution risk after being submerged in water, although Tesla claims to have put safety measures in place to prevent this.  

A deputy felt around until he located Chao’s hand, pulling her from the sunken vehicle. She could not be revived.

‘Angela’s passing was a terrible tragedy, and words cannot describe the family’s profound grief,’ a statement from her father James Chao said.

Texas Rangers and FBI reviewed pictures, video and reports from the scene, and ultimately said they ‘felt this incident was nothing more than an unfortunate accident.’ 

Overheating battery

In February 2023, four people died in a fireball crash involving a Tesla on Long Island’s North Fork.

Marketing executive Heath Miller was driving his friend William Price in his Tesla Model Y when it collided with an oncoming SUV.

The compact electric crossover’s lithium-ion battery immediately caught fire, according to The Independent.

The battery burned for more than two hours at a temperature that reached an estimated 4,000 degrees F, authorities said.

Miller was unable to escape the blaze, which police said was so powerful it prevented first responders from reaching him or Price.  

‘Usually, with gas engines, they are a lot easier to put out either with water or chemicals,’ Southold Police Chief Martin Flatley told local media at the time. ‘But this fire burned pretty hard and pretty intense.’

In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, Miller’s widow Sarah Mai Pugh Miller accused Tesla of knowingly putting ‘defective’ and ‘unreasonably dangerous’ vehicles on sale to the general public. 

Both people in the other car, physicians Peter Smith, 80, and Patricia O’Neill, 66, also died in the crash.

Tesla hit back at the suggestion made in Pugh Miller’s suit that the vehicle was in self-driving mode when it smashed into the SUV.

In a March response, the company said ‘the undisputed evidence establishes that Mr Miller was solely responsible’ for the crash. 

It submitted Miller’s toxicology report, which showed that his blood alcohol content was more than three times the legal driving limit at the time of the crash.

It also refuted his wife’s contention that her husband burned to death while trapped in the car, arguing that the toxicology report found ‘an absence of carbon monoxide in his chest blood, establishing that he did not survive the initial impact long enough to inhale smoke or fumes from the fire.’

Automated driving issues 

A 2021 Tesla crash likely killed two men after a ‘significant front-end collision’ ignited the battery, Texas fire officials said at the time.

Dr William Varner, 59, and Everette Talbot, 69, both died when Varner’s Tesla Model S – bought second-hand off eBay – smashed into a tree and burst into flames.

The car’s battery burned for four hours afterward, according to officials.   

A report from the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office stated that no one was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash, which it described as accidental.

‘There were signs of extensive mechanical damage caused by a front end collision, and the front end of the vehicle was in direct contact with the trunk of a large tree,’ the report read.

It also detailed how the vehicle’s ‘hood, front doors, front body panels, forward support pillars, trunk and roof were completely destroyed.

‘Multiple fire patterns produced by both the movement and intensity of the fire indicate that the fire originated from the vehicle’s power distribution system and related components located at the front end of the vehicle.

‘Any extensive damage to the battery, the power distribution systems, or the systems associated with battery cell temp regulation can result in electrical arcing and/or thermal runaway of the lithium-ion cells, which are both competent source of ignition.

‘The vehicle sustained a significant front end collision which damaged one, or many of these systems, leading to the development of fire within with the vehicle.’

Varner’s Model S crashed into trees just a few hundred yards from his $2 million home.

Talbot is said to have been found in the front passenger seat while Varner was in the back seat.

Tesla refuted the claim from local authorities that no one was in the driver’s seat at the time, insisting that the crash’s immediate aftermath data indicated it had not been operating on its semi-autonomous driving system.

Thirty-foot flames

Four friends died in a burning Tesla after a crash allegedly disabled the car’s electronic door handles in October last year.  

A woman in her 20s was the only survivor after Rick Harper, a heroic Canada Post employee, smashed the window of the blazing Model Y with a metal pole.

Four of her friends, identified as 25-year-old Neelraj Gohil, his sister Ketaba Gohil, 29, Jay Sisodiya and Digvijay Patel all died.

Harper has since told the Toronto Star that the surviving woman ‘couldn’t open the doors’ from the inside of the wreck.

‘I would assume the young lady would have tried to open the door from the inside, because she was pretty desperate to get out,’ Harper said.

‘I don’t know if that was the battery or what. But she couldn’t get out.’ 

Harper said the woman scrambled out of the car head-first after he smashed the window. 

‘We were on the opposite side of the river and we heard the tires squealing and we heard the impact,’ Keith Barrow, a foreman at QM environmental, told The Star. 

‘So I drove over to DVP and Lake Shore and by that time, the flames were 20, maybe 30 feet high. It was scary to see.’ 

Police said the car crashed into a guardrail at high speed along Lake Shore Boulevard East in Toronto.