Tesla founder Elon Musk on Saturday boasted that, with Autopilot engaged, his company’s electric motor vehicles were approaching a 10 times lower chance of becoming involved in an accident than average vehicles.

But just hours later, as fate would have it, two people were killed in a fiery Tesla crash that now appears to have occurred with Autopilot engaged.

Acording to a report on gossip website TMZ, police have revealed that neither of the two men, ages 59 and 69, was behind the wheel.

“Physical evidence after the Saturday night crash led authorities to believe the two men in the Tesla 2019 Model S were not driving it when it failed to navigate a turn, ran off the road and hit a tree … then burst into flames,” TMZ said in its report.

Mark Herman, a Harris County Precinct 4 constable, told the website that one of the men was in the front passenger seat and the other was in the rear seat as the vehicle travelled at high spped before the crash.

Law enforcement will be issuing subpoenas for information on car to determine with certainty if it was on Autopilot at the time of the incident.

According to Tesla’s accident data for the first quarter of 2021, “We registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged.”

Tesla added: “For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.”

While the data by no means suggests there Tesla vehicles are never involved in accidents, the deaths of two men hours after Musk highlighted the relative safety of his vehicles could be potentially damaging.

The men, who were with their wives minutes before the fatal wreck, had reportedly said they wanted to take the Tesla out for a drive a using the driver-assistance feature.

They have not been identified.

The accident comes amid growing scrutiny over Tesla’s semi-automated driving system following recent accidents and as it is preparing to launch its updated “full self-driving” software to more customers.

The NHTSA said in March it had opened 27 investigations into crashes of Tesla vehicles with at least three of the crashes occurring recently.

Musk said in January that he expects huge profits from Tesla’s full self-driving software and that he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year”.