Yes. Otherwise, you'd hear about coal pollution all the time, but nuclear meltdowns wouldn't make the news (unless they became much more frequent).

Similarly, 9/11 would be a footnote compared to sketchy pain killer drug trials. The black lives matter movement would focus more on sentencing disparities and for-profit prison conditions than police shootings, etc, etc.

The reason it matters here is that it's presumably easy for Tesla to fix any bugs that are killing people.