Tesla fire claims lives of four Indians in Canada after electronic door malfunctions

Four friends of Indian descent in Canada lost their lives in a burning Tesla after a crash that reportedly rendered the car's electronic door handles inoperable, according to the Daily Mail. The sole survivor, a woman in her 20s, was rescued from the crash on October 24 when Canada Post employee Rick Harper broke the window of the burning Tesla Model Y with a metal pole.

The victims were identified as 25-year-old Neelraj Gohil, his sister Ketaba Gohil, 29, along with Jay Sisodiya and Digvijay Patel.

Tesla vehicles lack traditional handles; instead, they use electronic buttons to open the doors. However, after a crash, power failures can cause these doors to jam. "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 was quoted as saying.

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

Harper recounted that the woman escaped the car head-first after he broke the window. The smoke was so dense that he couldn’t see there were others still trapped inside, leaving him uncertain whether they, too, had been desperately trying to get out.

Police said that the car was traveling at high speed when it struck a guardrail along Toronto's Lake Shore Boulevard East. The exact cause of the crash remains unkown yet.

While Tesla promotes a "safety-first design," experts point out that its manual door-release system is not widely known. This feature requires occupants to pull away a panel and tug a cable beneath it, but accident victims may be too panicked or disoriented to locate this in an emergency.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is conducting nine investigations into Tesla Model Y vehicles—the model involved in this incident—over issues such as "unexpected brake activation" and "sudden unintended acceleration."