A family sues Tesla, claiming their Model X accelerated on its own at a red light

Linh Nguyen and his family have sued Tesla, saying his 2023 Model X accelerated on its own while stopped at a red light in Kirkland, Washington, then blew out its own tires when it struck a curb. Nguyen says Autopilot kept him from braking or steering out of the crash, injuring him and his then-14-year-old daughter, who was riding in the SUV. The case, first filed in King County Superior Court, was moved to federal court this month, and it seeks damages over injuries that Nguyen says have not fully resolved.

A stopped SUV that would not stay stopped, the lawsuit says

Nguyen’s Model X was stopped at a red light at the intersection of 144th Street Northeast and 124th Avenue Northeast in Kirkland on June 29, 2023, when the SUV allegedly surged forward on its own, crossed into the intersection and hit a curb hard enough to burst its own tires. Nguyen was driving; his daughter, then 14, sat as a passenger. Neither Tesla nor Nguyen’s attorneys have said how fast the vehicle was moving when it struck the curb, and the complaint does not allege any other vehicle was involved in the crash.

Nguyen suffered injuries to his neck, back, shoulder, knees and left side, along with dizziness and confusion that the complaint says persisted well after the crash. His daughter was also hurt, and the suit does not describe her injuries as fully healed. Nguyen’s wife, Nga Thi Bich Vo, is also named as a plaintiff on the docket. The complaint does not specify a dollar figure for damages, framing the case instead around the product-liability theory that Autopilot itself caused a crash it was marketed to prevent.

Autopilot’s alleged failure to brake or steer away

The complaint centers on Tesla’s driver-assistance system, alleging it “failed to keep the SUV stopped, accelerated without Nguyen’s input, and prevented him from regaining control by braking or steering.” That is the core mechanical claim the case will have to prove: not merely that the Model X moved when it should not have, but that Autopilot actively resisted Nguyen’s attempts to stop it once it did.

Nguyen says he paid roughly $15,000 extra for the technology, a detail the suit uses to argue Tesla marketed a safety feature that instead caused the harm it was supposed to prevent.

NHTSA’s pedal-misapplication findings collide with the claim

Sudden-acceleration lawsuits against Tesla have repeatedly run into the same federal counter-narrative. A prior National Highway Traffic Safety Administration review of 118 sudden-acceleration complaints found that crashes for which event data was available were caused by pedal misapplication, with no evidence of a vehicle fault or ineffective brakes. That finding, cited in the Kirkland complaint’s own background section, cuts against the premise of Nguyen’s case before it reaches a jury.

It is not an isolated conclusion. In a separate petition denial published in March 2026, NHTSA said Tesla’s vehicles “responded appropriately to control inputs by their drivers” and found no defect tied to one-pedal driving or regenerative braking, a feature it noted exists across 64 models from 21 automakers. The agency’s own account of its process points to how narrow these investigations tend to be: a review opened the same year was still one of several the agency has cycled through on Tesla acceleration complaints without ordering a recall, and the company has been cleared on the sudden-acceleration question in past rounds even as regulators kept separate scrutiny of Full Self-Driving open.

None of that forecloses Nguyen’s case. A regulatory finding about complaints in aggregate does not resolve what happened inside one SUV on one evening in Kirkland, and product-liability suits routinely proceed past NHTSA’s no-defect conclusions by pointing to vehicle logs, data recorders or software versions the agency never examined. Discovery in the Nguyen case would likely turn on exactly that kind of vehicle-specific data rather than the broader complaint statistics NHTSA has already weighed.

Sudden-acceleration claims against automakers have a long, mixed record in American courts. Toyota paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 2010s over unintended-acceleration suits even after federal investigators largely blamed floor mats and sticky pedals rather than electronics, a reminder that regulatory exoneration and civil liability do not always move in lockstep. Tesla has faced a string of similar Autopilot-related suits in recent years, most alleging some version of the same pattern: a vehicle that moved, steered or failed to stop in a way its driver says contradicted deliberate input.

The case moves from King County to a federal courtroom

Tesla removed the case from King County Superior Court to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on September 23, 2026, citing diversity jurisdiction, a standard move when a defendant is incorporated outside the state where a suit is filed. The docket lists Nguyen and Vo as plaintiffs, with Tesla, Inc. as the sole named corporate defendant alongside placeholder “Doe” defendants pending discovery. No trial date had been set as of the removal filing.

Tesla has not issued a public statement responding to the specific allegations in the Nguyen complaint. The vehicle’s own logs, which Tesla has produced in prior Autopilot litigation to argue driver error, will likely become the central piece of evidence either side uses to settle what the company’s software actually did in the seconds before the curb strike.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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