A college basketball prospect has recounted the terrifying experience he endured after a tech issue left him trapped inside a burning Cybertruck.
“I [was] panicking,” Alija Arenas, a student at Los Angeles’ Chatsworth High School who’s committed to join the team at University of Southern California, told the LA Times. “I was fighting time.”
The ordeal began early one morning in April after Arenas left training at a local gym, heading home in the Cybertruck he’d borrowed from his father. He remembers the car’s system acting up not long into the drive.
With the keypad flashing strangely on the dash in front of him, the athlete says “the wheel wasn’t moving as easily as it should” as he attempted to change lanes. Then, another car began heading towards him.
“I speed up to pull over to the right in a neighborhood because there are cars parked on the street I’m on to the right,” he said. “But when I’m speeding up to turn, I can’t stop. The wheel wasn’t responding to me–as if I wasn’t in the car.”
Unable to control the vehicle, Arenas found himself tearing toward a fire hydrant and then into a tree, where the Cybertruck then abruptly burst into flames.
The car accident this morning involving incoming USC recruit Alijah Arenas occurred when the Cybertruck he was driving struck a fire hydrant and tree. Arenas was taken to the hospital in “stable condition”, per the LAPD pic.twitter.com/ERqoeNMhnt
— Ryan Kartje (@Ryan_Kartje) April 24, 2025
As the fire began to spread, the student athlete reached for his phone and attempted to use the car’s digital key in order to escape, only to find he’d been locked out of the Tesla app.
“I tried to open the door, and the door isn’t opening,” he said.
He then climbed into the back of the car to look for an exit route, but soon passed out from the smoke. When he woke again he could feel the heat on his body, so he doused himself with water from his gym bottle in a bid to cool down, biting his lips and pressing his nails against his skin to try and stop slipping in and out of consciousness.
Between bouts of trying to break the Cybertrunk’s notoriously “unbreakable” windows, at one point he came to and “realized my whole right side had caught on fire.” Eventually he was rescued after a group of local residents banded together to smash the windshield and pull him out into the street.
Before that, Arenas estimates he may have spent as long as ten minutes trapped inside the burning car. Despite the horror of the experience–which saw him spend six days in hospital, including a spell in an induced coma to help treat acute smoke inhalation–he’s reluctant to blame anyone other than himself for the incident.
“Honestly, I take full responsibility,” he said. “Whether it was me, another car, a malfunction. I don’t really want to put anyone else in this situation–whoever made the car, anything. I want to take full responsibility for what I do. If I would’ve hurt somebody, that would have really taken a toll on me.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Tesla for comment.
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