Tesla Cybertruck split in half in crash with G Wagon
A Tesla Cybertruck was split in half after another vehicle crashed into it in Frisco, Texas, a few days ago. Images of the aftermath are impressive.
On Friday, the driver of a Mercedes-Benz G Wagon lost control and crashed into seven vehicles parked on the side of the road.
The G Wagon driver was taken to the hospital in an unknown condition. He is believed to have had a medical emergency, which led to the loss of control. He was the only one injured, as no one was in the parked vehicles.
The accident is getting some attention for the aftermath.
It looks like the first vehicle hit by the driver was a Tesla Cybertruck, and it appears to have been cleanly cut in half at the bed from the impact:
At short of 6,000 lbs, a G Wagon is undoubtedly heavy, and it’s not clear at what speed it was going at the time of the impact.
There’s no doubt that it had a significant impact, but it is still surprising to see the Cybertruck’s bed ripped straight off the truck’s frame.
Some are pointing to Tesla’s use of aluminum in the Cybertruck’s frame.
Despite Tesla’s claim that the Cybertruck is “bulletproof” and made out of an “exoskeleton,” the electric vehicle’s build is actually much closer to a traditional unibody system rather than an “exoskeleton.” Most of the visible body parts, which would be part of the chassis in an exoskeleton build, are actually trims attached to the body.
Furthermore, while Tesla touts its “ultra-hard stainless steel exoskeleton,” it mostly uses stainless steel on external parts, while many parts of the frame are made of aluminum.
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Orange EV may not be a household name like Mack or Kenworth, but this small-ish maker of all-electric heavy duty terminal tractors is making a name for itself where it matters: on the job. And this week, the company’s deployed fleet logged its ten millionth hour of operation!
Despite claims from oil-backed “efficiency” groups and fossil-backed hydrogen propaganda to the contrary, battery-powered heavy-duty EVs are proving themselves more than capable of getting the job done today, with millions upon millions upon millions of over-the-road miles as proof. Now, Orange EV is throwing its own data into the mix, with a deployed fleet of HDEVs that’s logged ten million hours of operation across more than 27 million low-speed, extreme duty miles.
“Ten million hours makes one thing clear: Orange EV has taken electric terminal trucks from possible to proven,” said Kurt Neutgens, President and CTO of Orange EV. “Our 340 customers are operating at an average of 97% uptime, with no compromises, proving you can cut costs, boost performance, and improve health and safety all at once.”
What might be more impressive than the miles covered, though, is how few trucks Orange has deployed to get to that number. The company reports that multiple units have already surpassed 30,000 hours of active service while others still are approaching a full decade of daily use — and all of them are still running on their original Orange-designed LFP battery packs.
“Diesel yard trucks rarely achieve this level of durability, but Orange EV delivers with every truck,” adds Neutgens, a former Ford engineer. “Every hour of safe, reliable operation raises the bar for what fleets should expect from their equipment.”
Since delivering its first customer truck back in 2015, Orange EV has deployed more than 1,600 trucks across 40 states and four Canadian provinces. Together, these trucks have eliminated approximately 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide and saved fleets over $100 million (US) in fuel and maintenance costs alone. And, in more than 10 million hours of duty, not a single Orange EV yard truck battery has experienced a thermal event.
Electrek’s Take
Over at The Heavy Equipment Podcast, we had a chance to talk to Orange EV founder Kurt Neutgens ahead of last year’s ACT Expo for clean trucking. On the show (available here), Kurt explained how his experience at Ford helped inform his design ideology, and that the Orange EV was designed to be cost competitive with diesel options, even without subsidies.
Give it a listen, then let us know whether you think the big yard dogs’ success will help debunk the “messy middle” myths or not, in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Orange EV.
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EUNICE, NEW MEXICO — Paul Lorskulsint was a shift manager at a brand new uranium enrichment facility deep in the American Southwest when catastrophe struck Japan in 2011.
A massive tsunami and earthquake had caused a severe accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Thousands of miles away in Eunice, New Mexico, Lorskulsint turned on the television to make sure his team could witness what was happening across the Pacific Ocean.
Lorskulsint knew the disaster in Japan was a watershed moment for the nuclear industry. The plant where he was leading an operations shift had just opened in 2010, after the European uranium enricher Urenco had spent years building the facility in anticipation of growing demand.
Over the ensuing decade, public support for nuclear power diminshed and a dozen reactors closed in the U.S. as the industry struggled to compete against a flood of cheap natural gas and renewable energy. Demand for the low enriched uranium that fuels nuclear plants dwindled.
“The price of what we sold basically went through the floor,” Lorskulsint, who is now the chief nuclear officer at Urenco USA, told CNBC. Urenco’s long-term contracts with utilities insulated the facility during the downturn, he said, but the price drop put further expansion plans on hold.
Paul Lorskulsint, Chief Nuclear Officer, Urenco USA talks about the uranium enrichment process.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Headquartered outside London, Urenco is joinly owned by the British and Dutch goverments and two German utilities. Its New Mexico facility is the only commercial enrichment facility left in the U.S. The last U.S.-owned commercial facility in Paducah, Kentucky, closed in 2013 and its owner the United States Enrichment Corporation went bankrupt during the downturn after Fukushima.
Fourteen years later, the situation has reversed once again. Urenco USA is racing to expand its enrichment capacity. The nuclear industry is gaining momentum as electricity demand in the U.S. is projected to surge from artificial intelligence and the push to expand domestic manufacturing. Doubts persist about whether U.S. power supplies will ramp up quick enough to meet the needs. Increasing uranium enrichment will be a key part of the process, despite the history of past disappointments.
Also, U.S. enriched uranium supplies are at risk. The U.S. still imported 20% of its enriched uranium from Russia in 2024, a legacy of the now shattered hope for friendship between the two countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War.
The U.S. will completely ban the import Russian uranium by 2028 in repsonse to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, leaving a gapping supply deficit just when Washington, the utilities and the tech sector are developing the most ambitious plans in decades to build new reactors.
Nuclear plants like Palisades in Michigan, Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa are planning to restart operations this decade after closing years ago. The tech sector is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring advanced reactors online in the 2030s to help power their computer warehouses that train and run AI applications.
“It is a pivotal moment, the next five to 10 years for the nuclear industry,” Lorskulsint said. “We’re going to have to have to deliver on time, on schedule and continue to maintain that momentum, which is a significant challenge.”
Employees at Urenco USA receive a cylinder of feed material for enrichment process.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Expansion plans
In deeply divided Washington, support for nuclear power is one of the few issues that can still muster some bipartisan support. President Donald Trump wants to quadruple nuclear power by 2050, a significant increase over President Joe Biden’s previous goal to triple it by that date.
The U.S. has only built one new nuclear plant from scratch in the past 30 years, raising doubts about whether such ambitious plans can be realized. But any effort big or small to expand nuclear power in the U.S. will run through Urenco’s facility in New Mexico.
The plant currently has capacity to supply about a third of U.S. demand with $5 billion invested in the facility to date. Urenco is expanding its capacity in New Mexico by 15% through 2027 as utilties replace Russian fuel. It has installed two new centrifuge cascades for enrichment this year. But Urenco’s expansion alone won’t fill the Russian supply gap, Lorskulsint said.
“Our competitors will have to expand in order to make sure that as a whole the industry is still supplied,” he said. “We’re building quickly as we can to make sure that the the industry is not short handed.”
As Russian fuel is banned from the U.S., the Trump administration is pushing for 10 new large reactors to start construction this decade. Alphabet is investing in about 2 gigawatts of new nuclear, Amazon has committed to more than 5 gigawatts, and Meta wants to bring up to 4 gigawatts online.
Urenco USA Facilities in Eunice, New Mexico.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
The industry is worried about the supply gap, Lorskulsint said, but filling it “is not an insurmountable task.”
Urenco USA is a candidate to receive a contract from the Department of Energy to produce more low-enriched uranium, part of U.S. efforts to standup a domestic nuclear supply chain. The contract would allow the New Mexico facility to expand further with the construction of a fourth production building.
Urenco’s competitors are also seeking support from the Energy Department to build out U.S. enrichment capacity. France’s Orano is planning to build a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennesse, with operations potentially starting in the 2030s.
Publicly traded Centrus has a facility in Piketon, Ohio, where it plans to produce low-enriched uranium, but it hasn’t yet started commercial operations. Centrus is the successor company to the United States Enrichment Corporation that went bankrupt in 2013.
Centrus stock has gained more than 400% this year as investors bet on a growing demand for enriched uranium due to U.S. plans to expand nuclear power.
Paul Lorskulsint, Chief Nuclear Officer, Urenco USA talks about the uranium enrichment process next to centrifuge cascade.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Supply chain bottlenecks
But enrichment is just one stage in a long supply chain that will be stretched by growing demand. Uranium delivered to the U.S is often mined in Canada and it is then converted into intermediate state called uranium hexafluoride that is the feedstock for enrichment.
The feedstock is spun in Urenco’s centrifuges to increase the presence of the isotope Uranium-235 to 5%, the level needed for most nuclear plants. The enriched uranium is then shipped to fuel fabricators that manufacture the pellets that go into reactors in power plants.
U.S. nuclear plants are facing cumulative supply gap of 184 million pounds of uranium through 2034, according to the Energy Information Administration.The biggest bottleneck right now for Urenco is the conversion of uranium into the feedstock for enrichment, Lorskulsint said. There are only three facilities in the Western world located in Canada, France and Illinois that convert uranium into feedstock.
“Every portion of the supply chain is going to have to expand, it’s not just about enrichment,” Lorskulsint said. “We need more of everything but conversion right now is the bottleneck.”
The nuclear supply chain may not be the biggest challenge in the end, the executive said. The ageing U.S. electric grid could prove to be the real constraint on building new nuclear due how long it takes to complete upgrades, he said. While this could slow Urenco down, it won’t stop the expansion, he said.
“We came here when the market demanded it,” Lorskulsint said of Urenco’s investment in the U.S. “We were here when the market didn’t demand it. And we are now expanding to make sure that we can still support as much as the market needs from us.”
Two Bay Area families are suing Tesla over the death of their 19-year-old daughter and 20-year-old son after a crash which left them and one other teenager dead, trapped inside the vehicle due to what the lawsuit alleges is poor door handle design.
The lawsuit traces back to a 2024 crash on Thanksgiving Eve in Piedmont, California, where a Cybertruck carrying four college students crashed into a tree and a wall, causing a fire. As a result of the crash, the Cybertruck’s electronic door handles no longer worked, and the passengers were trapped inside.
A surveillance video released by the California Highway Patrol showed the Cybertruck’s final moments, rounding a curve at high speed and seeming to lose control of the rear of the vehicle as it crested a hill, with a large flash seen in the video after the Cybertruck leaves the frame.
A friend in another vehicle that had been following the Cybertruck stopped and managed to break the front passenger window after “ten to fifteen hits” with a fallen tree branch and pull one passenger out of the vehicle, but the other three passengers died inside of asphyxia from smoke inhalation and had burns on their body.
Tesla vehicles typically do receive high scores for passenger safety in crash tests, and Tesla has touted its “armor glass” as being hard to break (despite a famously failed demo at the Cybertruck’s introduction). And it appears that the occupants did not die from the crash impact itself, but rather from being trapped inside and the resulting smoke and burns.
The three college students who died were 19 year old Krysta Tsukarahara and Soren Dixon, and 20 year old Jack Nelson. Dixon had been driving the vehicle, and post-crash investigations discovered that all three had been under the influence at the time of the crash. All were high school friends home from college for Thanksgiving and had spent the night out together on what is known to be one of the worst drunk driving nights of the year.
After the crash, Tsukahara’s family filed a lawsuit against the estate of Dixon, the driver of the car. The car belonged to Dixon’s relative.
The Tsukaharas have now amended their case to include Tesla as a defendant after post-crash investigations suggested the car’s design contributed to the deaths, blaming door handles that are difficult to operate and doors and windows that are hard for rescuers to access for their child’s death. Nelson’s family filed a separate lawsuit, with the same allegation.
Tesla’s door handles in focus
Tesla vehicles have electronic door handles, with outer door handles that are flush against the vehicle. This enhances the sleek look of the exterior, and also leads to small aerodynamic gains.
However, it also leads to confusing operation, as each car the company has released so far has had a different door handle in a different place on the vehicle with a different method of operation than the last.
This also means that the outer door handles can be hard to operate in an emergency situation. In the crash described above, the rescuer had to bash at the Cybertruck’s window “ten to fifteen” times, after having failed to punch it out with his fist. An externally operable door handle would have perhaps resulted in a different outcome.
Further, the interior door release can be confusing in an emergency situation. Normally one just presses the interior door release button, which operates electronically. However, when there’s a problem with the vehicle, that system can become disconnected and require a manual release.
Every Tesla has a manual release, but it’s often hidden in a place that passengers may not know to look, or may have difficulty finding in an emergency scenario, especially for rear seat passengers.
On the Cybertruck, the front manual door release is relatively easy to access, just in front of the window switches. Indeed, sometimes passengers will accidentally pull this lever rather than the electronic door release (which is not recommended, as it can damage the window trim). In the event of this crash, at least one passenger was described as “barely conscious,” and thus operation of the door handle may not have been an option.
But the rear release is much harder to find. To access it, one must remove a rubber mat from the map pocket, revealing a mechanical release cable with a loop on the end, then pull it forward.
Tsukahara’s parents say that she “was alive after the crash. She called out for help. And she couldn’t get out.” It is conceivable that simpler door handles may have resulted in a different outcome, though three of the vehicle’s doors were obstructed by the wall and tree that it had crashed into. The right rear door, the seat occupied by Nelson, was unobstructed, according to the Nelsons’ lawsuit.
Tesla’s other cars have similarly hidden mechanical door releases in the rear, under carpet under the seat in the Model S, under the map pocket in the Model 3 and Model Y, or behind the speaker grille in the Model X.
These designs have resulted in criticism, and have been the focus of government agencies recently. Tesla is currently being investigated by the NHTSA over its door handle design, and Tesla has confirmed that it is finally redesigning its handles.
Elsewhere in the world, Chinese auto regulators are mulling a ban on retractable door handles, as many sleek new EVs have taken on the trend that Tesla started with its flush door handles.
There have been several lawsuits against Tesla for deaths in its vehicles, often associated with the company’s Autopilot or Full Self-Driving systems. The company typically chooses to settle these lawsuits out of court, despite CEO Elon Musk stating “we will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose,” though it did refuse to settle a recent case and ended up with a $243 million judgment against it, in the first Tesla ADAS case that reached trial.
While this crash had nothing to do with the company’s driver assist systems, it will be interesting to see how Tesla responds to this lawsuit.
The two cases are Nelson v Tesla Inc. and Tsukahara v Dixon, both filed in the California Superior Court in Alameda County. Tsukahara’s case has been set for trial in February 2027.
Electrek’s Take
When I was in high school, a very similar accident happened. A large SUV was speeding around a curve, lost control, and rolled. The teenagers inside were under the influence, though the driver wasn’t in this case. It was national news, and significantly affected our community.
Many other communities have felt the same. It’s a common story. And yet, we still keep building these giant, lumbering land yachts, thinking that it enhances safety when it does not.
But that’s somewhat of an aside here. If the Cybertruck were more nimble or less “impenetrable,” maybe the crash results would have been different. But the focus on door handles is one simple, clear change that would have saved lives in this instance.
Tesla has always had weird door handles, and the door handles have always ended up causing some sort of problem. Whether it be overly complicated latches which make repair costly as in the Model S, overly complicated door which delay release like the Model X, oddly-placed manual door releases that can cause abnormal wear on the Model 3 and Y, or even the svelte door handles on my original Roadster which are currently giving me a weird problem I can’t even explain here, this is a pattern.
And the pattern doesn’t just apply to door handles, but to much of how Tesla works as a company, with the “move fast and break things” approach common in technology. While Tesla has been innovative, those innovations sometimes have come with less consideration for safety than they perhaps should have.
Now, with these Cybertruck deaths, maybe we can finally get a little reason and have Tesla be more normal with its door handles, at least.
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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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