Dunking on the Cybertruck just feels like bullying now. It’s low-hanging fruit, and everyone has already piled on. But it isn’t bullying to point out how catastrophically the wealthiest man in the world has failed. After all, you can’t “punch up” any higher, especially when the Cybertruck epitomises everything wrong with Tesla and Musk’s egotistical and megalomaniacal leadership. It is a symbol of the rot at play, not just within Musk, but within the tech industry and wider economy in general, because if this is what the richest man in the world can produce, how close can we really be to a meritocracy or a healthy economy? And nothing proves this more than a recent lawsuit filed by grieving families, who lost their children to a Cybertruck fire.
Warning, this next part gets a little graphic.
The day before Thanksgiving, in Piedmont, California, four young adults were driving in a Cybertruck when it crashed. It was being driven at high speed when it lost control and hit a wall and a tree — which is a serious crash, but one that is easily survivable in a modern car. While the three occupants escaped mostly unharmed, the compromised battery pack ignited and filled the cabin with smoke. This meant the electrically operated doors stopped working, and because the internal manual releases are hidden and difficult to find, this effectively trapped the occupants inside. Luckily, there was a friend following them in a car behind. The friend rushed to help but couldn’t open the doors from the outside, so they grabbed a branch from the tree and tried to break the glass. It then took “ten to fifteen hits” for the glass to finally break. Sadly, they could only get one of the passengers out due to the intensity of the fire. The three left in the car died from smoke inhalation and experienced burns to their bodies.
This shouldn’t have happened. It was a bad crash, but one that the passengers should have escaped from with only minor injuries. How could it have gotten so bad?
Well, it’s almost like the Cybertruck was designed to kill people this way.
Let’s start with the battery. Tesla uses lithium-ion batteries, which, when punctured or crushed, rapidly and violently combust, causing the entire pack to explode if one cell goes. This is one of the main reasons why much of the EV industry is turning to LFP cells, as you can literally drive a nail right through them, and they won’t even begin to smoke. But lithium-ion batteries can be safe if the pack is designed not to take structural forces, is inherently thermally efficient, uses non-flammable materials, or is properly insulated from the rest of the car.
Tesla didn’t do that with the Cybertruck.
Instead, it sets its entire battery pack in flammable polyurethane resin and uses it as a structural, load-bearing part of the vehicle’s chassis. Tesla did this to make the vehicle easier and cheaper to produce. However, given that it is a load-bearing part of an incredibly heavy vehicle, huge forces are applied to the pack during a crash. The polyurethane resin is flexible to a point and able to absorb some forces, but beyond a certain point, or if a force is applied suddenly (like during a crash), it will crack or fail to deform quickly enough and transfer these forces into the cells. When that happens, it will rupture or crush the cells, causing them to burst into flames. Polyurethane is also an insulator, meaning more heat will be retained within the pack, causing more “thermal runaway”, making it more likely for all the cells to ignite. Afterwards, temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Celsius, and because polyurethane ignites at around 400 degrees Celsius, the resin the batteries are set in will burn fiercely too, releasing highly toxic gaseous substances. Unfortunately, there isn’t much between this polyurethane and the inside of the car, given that the battery pack is a structural component, so the smoke, toxic substances and the heat of the fire get pumped directly into the cabin.
It sounds bad, but it gets worse.
Vehicle fires aren’t actually that uncommon, particularly with combustion-powered vehicles. But deaths from vehicle fires are pretty rare. This is because occupants can typically open the door and exit, or if they are incapacitated, someone outside can open the door or break the side window glass to get them out before the fire becomes too severe.
You can’t do this with the Cybertruck.
The internal door handles are electrically operated and powered by the main battery. So, when it catches fire, they stop working. There are manual overrides, but they are hidden and hard to find. This is why those passengers didn’t simply open the doors and exit, because the Cybertruck effectively trapped them inside.
Outside, there are no door handles and no manual overrides. The only way to open the door is an electrically powered touch button, which again fails when the battery pack is on fire. This is why the friend couldn’t open the doors and get them all out and had to resort to trying to break a window.
However, unlike most cars that intentionally use brittle windows on the sides to enable them to be broken in an accident, Tesla fitted highly durable laminated glass in all of the Cybertruck’s windows, making them nearly impossible to break. This is why it is so impressive that this friend was able to break the glass at all and save one life.
Let’s also not forget that the hardened stainless steel body panels make it harder for rescue crews to cut away doors, pillars and roofs to extract injured passengers. This is something they would do to keep people with neck and back injuries from moving, potentially saving their mobility, or in cases when the vehicle’s chassis has been deformed so heavily that the person is trapped. So, even if the battery pack didn’t catch fire, there is still a serious issue with rescue and ambulance services accessing people in crashed Cybertrucks.
No other EV maker designs vehicles like this. Tesla has gone against the grain here. Why? Well, it is all but confirmed that Elon Musk was heavily involved in the design of the Cybertruck, and countless leaks and Tesla whistleblowers have highlighted how Musk ignores engineers’ safety advice. In short, all these wildly dangerous design choices came from Musk’s arrogance, ignorance, and wilful disregard for safety in the pursuit of profit and aesthetics.
And the families of the deceased in that crash have come to the same conclusion and are bringing a lawsuit against Tesla for wrongful death. Rather than focusing on the plethora of issues, they have focused on the interior door handles, claiming that their deaths were caused by the manual overrides being hidden.
If they win, it could be a hell of a blow for Tesla. After all, there is a bit of a precedent for this kind of stuff.
I have covered this topic before, but the Cybertruck is actually worse than the Ford Pinto.
You might not have heard of the Pinto and its notorious past. Back in the ’70s, Ford wanted a compact, super-affordable car for the US market, which gave birth to the Pinto. Ford had to cut some corners to get the price down to the equivalent of less than $15,000 in today’s money. One of these corners was the fuel tank, which was mounted behind the rear axle and fitted without any protection. Ford knew that even a minor rear collision could rupture the tank, causing a deadly fire. They also knew that fixing this would only cost $11 per vehicle, about $70 in today’s money. However, Ford’s higher-ups sent a memo that prevented this fix, as they figured it would be far cheaper to keep the fault and pay off victims and their mourning families.
This became a national scandal, even before this memo was discovered, and the Pinto was rightfully branded the most dangerous vehicle on the road.
But analysis from FuelArc found that the Cybertruck has a far higher risk of death by fire than the Pinto. During the first year of sales, the 34,438 Cybertrucks Tesla delivered were involved in five fatalities resulting from vehicular fires. By comparison, the 3.1 million Pintos Ford produced caused 27 deaths through vehicular fires over a decade. If you crunch the numbers, the Pinto had 0.85 fire fatalities per 100,000 units, while the Cybertruck had 14.52 per 100,000 units.
That means the Tesla is 17 times more likely to kill its occupants by fire than a car that literally had a petrol bomb strapped to its bumper!
When the Pinto scandal broke out, Ford was flooded with lawsuits from grieving families who had lost their loved ones due to Ford’s immoral actions. When that memo became public knowledge, this outrage became even more intense, and almost instantly these lawsuits became a slam dunk. Eventually, a jury awarded the victims the equivalent of $900 million in today’s money for their losses.
But here’s the real kicker: all Teslas have this stupid internal door handle issue. The Model S even hides the manual override underneath the carpet!
Regardless, across their entire range, Tesla has caused 83 deaths from vehicle battery fires. Think about that in comparison to a company like BYD, which has sold almost as many EVs and has never registered a single death from a battery fire. Teslas catch fire as often as any other EV, so what is causing this higher death rate? Almost every car safety expert points to the door handles.
Now, engineers and internal safety experts would have almost certainly noticed this and alerted Musk, and he almost certainly ignored it anyway. Musk has done this kind of thing multiple times before — for example, he forced FSD to operate in vision-only mode, despite his engineers’ warnings that it would make the system dangerous (read more here). In other words, Tesla almost certainly has an incriminating memo floating around, just as there was with the Pinto.
This means that this Cybertruck lawsuit could enable or rekindle other similar lawsuits over other Tesla deaths, like Ford had with all the families of the victims of their Pinto. But the Pinto case set a kind of precedent for how much victims of such malpractice should be compensated. So, if you scale up the compensation of the Pinto case in line with the number of deaths caused by Tesla door handles, you will find that Tesla could face a $2.77 billion bill!
This is why it is still worth talking about the Cybertruck. It is not just me calling it a death trap, but a chorus of safety experts, and we can trace these faults directly back to Musk’s ego, arrogance, ignorance, and poor leadership. Yet, he is now the wealthiest man in the world, because investors believe that he will somehow dominate the AI and robotics industries, despite the fact that both have far more complex, and arguably far more impactful, safety issues. The Cybertruck is one of the best tools we have to expose that Elon Musk isn’t actually wearing any clothes and, in fact, has giant skid marks up his back before he causes even more damage. As such, I hope this lawsuit succeeds, and Musk is held to account.
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Sources: Electrek, Car Scoops, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Tesla Fire, Large Battery, NIH
A related problem is that power windows fail if a vehicle is submerged, and water pressure stops the door from being opened. We keep a small hammer in the car for this reason.
But $2.77 billion (a) is a tiny blip on Tesla’s balance sheet and (b) is probably covered by insurance.