Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).
The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.
Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
