Featured Image Credit: Peevey Funeral & Cremation/FREDERIC J. BROWN/Getty
Topics: Cars, Tesla, Cybertruck
Gerrard Kaonga
Topics: Cars, Tesla, Cybertruck
A lawsuit has been brought against Elon Musk's Tesla following the death of a man who was reportedly burned alive in the car after a malfunction.
A Tesla Cybertruck owner in Texas was said to be unable to escape the vehicle after the car crashed into a ditch last year.
Michael Sheehan, 47, became trapped inside the vehicle when the battery burst into flames and caused such devastation that the man’s skeleton was incinerated, according to his family.
Sheehan’s widow and parents have now filed a lawsuit against Musk's company.
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Speaking to the Independent, attorney S. Scott West reflected on Sheehan’s death.
He said: “He was eight inches shorter in length than he was before he burned. That's thermal fracture.”
West, who worked as an industrial design engineer before he became a lawyer, spoke about the lawsuit against Tesla and noted the situation could have been vastly different as the crash should have been survivable.
The suit also condemned the company saying the vehicle was ‘defectively designed’ and should not have ‘trapped’ the nurse inside.
West added: “Every religion has a version of hell, and every version of hell has fire. It is the most excruciating and longest torture of any death. Whether it's steam or fire or electrical, the nerves are literally exposed to everything.
“It's horrific. If you've ever been to a hospital burn unit, you'll hear patients begging the doctors to let them die because the pain is so bad.”
The incident happened only 102 days after Shaheen purchased his brand new Cybertruck from a Tesla showroom in the Houston suburb of Cypress, Texas, on April 25, 2024.
The complaint also goes into more detail of the crash that cost Shaheen his life.
He was driving home when the Cybertruck ‘left the road’ and struck a large concrete culvert, after which the vehicle’s ‘hyper volatile’ battery system went into ‘thermal runaway’.
This is a chain reaction of short-circuits ultimately resulting in uncontrollable temperature escalation.
When power was lost, it then became impossible for Sheehan to open the Cybertruck’s electrically operated doors in normal way, according to the lawsuit.
It added that the emergency manual door release handles inside the vehicle are ‘unreasonably difficult to locate in an emergency.’
West added: “Michael was a Mensa-level guy, very, very smart.
“But when Tesla delivered this [Cybertruck] to him, the instructions they gave him were woefully inadequate to handle a situation like this.”
Speaking of his own experience driving a Tesla for the first time, West revealed he ‘felt like an idiot’ and said it was important for the company to address these issues for other new customers.
He said: “That’s the eternal factor in human error – it’s incumbent upon you as a manufacturer to take extra steps to recognize that [new Tesla owners] need additional training.”
UNILAD has contacted Tesla for comment.