It's also a reminder to engineers to have an extremely high bar of excellence.
EDIT: thanks for telling me I'm wrong. This was a self-serving blog post on their part to damage control.
Imagine how many press releases there'd be per day if another auto company felt compelled to do one for each accident their cars were involved in.
This isn't just another horrible car accident on US roads, the car was in charge this time and a technology they've been heralding for it's safety is going to be blamed. That's why there is a federal investigation into it. That's why there is a press release to protect the stock price.
Other auto accidents are non-interesting to the public, but this one involved automated driving.
The Tesla suspension issue with non-disclosure agreements also made front pages, just a week or two ago.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/11/tesla-revises-nondisclosure-c...
Tesla's blog is their primary marketing / damage control arm. Anything they publish there becomes instant news.
This is as bad as it sounds.
On the other hand, Tesla doesn't do this for every accident. They are treating this one special because Autopilot very carefully, and in a fully controlled manner, drove the car directly into a semi-trailer, which is more than a little embarrassing for the company. And terminal for the driver.