Adding my two cents here. The day of the accident, I read a local newspaper report (local to where the accident occurred) that reported 3 occupants in the car. Whose to say that there wasn't a driver in the driving seat who escaped from the crash before anyone arrived at the scene. The reason for doing so would be to escape being charged with the deaths of the 2 other occupants as well as civil liability suits and a host of other legal problems. Of course the report of a 3rd occupant could have been supposition on the part of that newspaper when they were told both bodies were found in passenger seats.
Having said that, let's go with what has been reported by the majority of the media. Two occupants of the car, one, the car owners friend in the front passenger seat, the other, the owner found in the rear passenger seat. Here is what I see as the most likely scenario. The owner starts out in the front driver's seat and his friend is next to him in the front passenger seat. They are driving around and talking about the car and all its technology including the Auto-pilot function. The driver (owner) wants to impress upon his friend how great his car is, so he sets the cruise control and believes he has activated the Auto-pilot, which Tesla says can't be done if there are no lines on the road, which it is said was the case here. The driver, believing that he can yield all control of the car to the car, unbuckles his seat belt and lifts himself out of the seat, over the console, through the gap between the front seats, and into the back seat (I've had passengers in my car do this plenty of times when I was driving growing up). He does this to prove to his friend that he is not supplying any control or input to the car. The car, having never really been engaged in Auto-pilot, or momentarily engaged and then self disengaged, continues at speed, in the direction it was pointed, ultimately resulting in the crash. The same scenario could be re-enacted today with any car equipped with cruise control. Has there been an outcry for better safety features in those cars? The answer is "NO". So why is Tesla being singled out? The simple answer is, "because it's Tesla" and has led the way in electric cars and self driving technology, so they are expected to have ALL the answers; even the answers to human beings making stupid decisions and doing stupid things.
This driving accident, bears a great deal of similarity in one respect to the accident in Layton, Utah, where the headline read, "Bird Box challenge leads to two-car crash in US, despite Netflix warnings". In both cases, the driver of the car did something inherently unsafe and decidedly stupid. The one in Utah, by thinking she could safely operate a car without being able to see where she was going and the Tesla owner thinking he could operate a car without being in the driver's seat where he could have control of the car. Both instances act to reinforce the saying "the least safe part of a motor vehicle, is the operator". By the way, in the Utah accident, they never mentioned the manufacturer of the car she was operating, which brings me to my next point.
The point I'd like to make here, is about how the media reports things like this. Why is it necessary for every news reporting agency to emphasize, and include in the headline, that the car was a Tesla; to single one car manufacturer out as if the car was at fault for a driver's unthinking behavior? I can only surmise that it's because of news media bias, where the media believes it makes the news more "news worthy" if they say the car was a Tesla. Thousands of auto fatalities occur every day in the U.S., and you don't see headlines like "Toyota SUV Involved In Head On Collision", "Ford Pickup Causes 3 Fatalities", "Volkswagen Golf Strikes Tree Killing 2". More often than not, the vehicle involved in the accident isn't mentioned until you start to read the article, somewhere in the first or second paragraph, if it's mentioned at all, and usually says something to the effect of "the operator of a" or "the driver of a". Seems like the name Tesla has become instant click bait. Let's see if the first news report of a fatality involving a Ford Mustang Mach-E includes the manufacturer's name in the headline.