I'm not sure about the specific personnel (were they killed in the explosion?) but that the tank was easier to drive, I fully believe.

As an instructor for old tanks, one of the issues we had was convincing insurance companies that tanks are designed to be inherently easy to drive. "You! Peasant! Stop picking potatoes in that Ukrainian field, instead go get glorious Soviet tank and crush fascists!" We're not talking about people with today's knowledge of cars, and by the way, of course, cars were a little trickier back then to drive anyway. And if you hit something when driving your tank, so what? You're in a tank!

The electric power train meant that there was no worry about things such as "shifting gears", and, being electric, the torque and power was available for the whole speed range as oppose to in certain bands, which wasn't that huge anyway, so there was plenty of opportunity to avoid any obstacles you didn't feel like crushing.