Manual door releases in Tesla’s Cybertruck and its electric car models are too hard to find and won’t open in an emergency if the vehicle’s power goes out, a lawsuit alleges. Legislation in Congress would mandate a power-independent manual release in every car door.

On Aug. 21, Tesla filed a recall with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation covering nearly 3 million of its vehicles. In the filing, Elon Musk’s company admitted that the emergency mechanical door releases inside its cars, the ones occupants are supposed to find when the doors will not open, were close in color to the interior trim around them and not easy to identify or operate. 

The filing stated that in an extreme situation such as a severe collision that disables the vehicle’s low-voltage system, the electronic door releases “may impede occupants from quickly opening doors to escape and prevent external rescue efforts, creating safety hazards.” 

I have spent years as an attorney working on cases focused on people getting out of cars and arguing that Tesla’s doors are defective. I currently represent the family of a college student who died in a 2024 Cybertruck crash in Piedmont, in which two other people were killed. Our complaint alleges that the occupants survived the impact and then died in the fire, unable to get the doors open, and the case is in the early stages of discovery in the Superior Court of Alameda. 

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Bloomberg has documented at least 15 deaths in the United States involving Tesla doors trapping occupants. At the heart of our case is not what caused the crash in Piedmont, but our contention that design........

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