The I2C bus is originally designed for inter-chip communication on a single PCB and if you have long wires in your system, it is not particularly robust when dealing with the kind of electrical noise that high power DC motors can produce. This Hackaday article has a good overview of the types of issues that can happen using I2C over longer wires.
One of our customers reports solving an electrical noise issue by using shielded signal cable to connect some VL53L0X sensors in this forum post.
-Nathan