That's not really why this is getting attention. The core issue here is that Tesla is shipping a product called "autopilot", which gives the expectation that it is in fact an autopilot. In the background, people are hearing that autonomous cars are "3 years away!!!" so the expectation is that the Tesla Autopilot feature is the real deal.

Thus you have people watching movies, falling asleep, or driving on dangerous roads using a technology that nowhere near delivers what the name promises. The result is people are dying and getting hurt by an immature technology being pushed too hard by an irresponsible company.

Tesla has gone out of their way to get more and more attention. For a company that sells only tens of thousands of cars it's pretty amazing. Until these recent crashes the majority of that press has been very positive.

The downside of this is that when you get bad publicity it's going to be much bigger as well.

That's the price of celebrity.