- Tesla’s FSD is finally approved in Europe, but only in the Netherlands for now.
- Europe’s stricter rules and additional regulatory hurdles slowed Tesla far more than in the U.S.
- This is still supervised driver assist, not actual autonomous driving, but the Euro version of FSD has some differences.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) has finally been approved for use in Europe, but only in one market for now. The Netherlands is first, giving Tesla a breakthrough after a long and publicly frustrating wait for Elon Musk, and it should open the door for broader European approval.
Approval came from the RDW, the Dutch vehicle authority, after more than 18 months of testing and analysis on both public roads and test tracks. Back in January, Elon Musk said Tesla hoped to get approval in Europe “next month,” a timeline that clearly slipped. Tesla had been chasing approval in Europe while dealing with tougher safety rules that made rollout more difficult than in the United States.
It said in a Friday email that ‘For the past 18 months, Tesla has been working hard toward shipping FSD (Supervised) in Europe. Tesla has produced thousands of pages of documentation, thousands of track test scenario executions, dozens of research studies into safety performance and results, and has given demos to regulators of almost every EU country. Today’s announcement marks a significant milestone, opening the way to safer roads for all.’
The way systems like FSD are certified for use on public roads in Europe is very different from that in the U.S., where an automaker can essentially self-certify, and regulators will intervene only if something goes wrong. This is what allowed Tesla to essentially use its customers (who had to pay thousands upfront to have FSD enabled in their vehicles before the service changed to a monthly subscription) as beta testers for years—this would never fly in Europe.
According to Not a Tesla App, users who went on FSD ridealongs suggest that the versions of FSD for Europe and the U.S. differ. One big difference is that instead of speed profiles, which range from ‘Sloth’ to ‘Mad Max’ in the U.S. version, in Europe, FSD has ‘Max Speed’ and ‘Max Speed Offset’ settings
Tesla launched the initial FSD beta in October 2020, and it was available only to Tesla employees and approved testers. The program grew over time, and by April 2022, there were over 100,000 active users. FSD remained in beta until April 2024, when version 12.3.3 was rolled out as the first ‘supervised’ version. However, even though the naming changed, it was still essentially unfinished, and it remains so today.
The manufacturer notes that ‘FSD (Supervised) requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous. The driver remains responsible at all times during operations.’ It added that ‘Prior to customer deployment, Tesla conducted extensive internal testing of FSD (Supervised) across Europe—covering more than 1.6 million kilometers with FSD (Supervised) active.’
It offered ride-along experiences to over 13,000 people in Europe in preparation for a wider rollout, and says ‘collisions are up to 7x less likely per kilometer driven compared to manual driving alone’ based on its own testing methodology. However, as I explained in this article published in October, there’s not enough context for the ‘safer than humans’ claim, and Tesla still doesn’t release the kind of detailed reports we would need to judge this properly.
It’s undeniable that Tesla FSD may outperform a human driver as it has proven that it can often predict dangerous situations and react better, but it’s still got a long way to go before it becomes a truly autonomous driving system. And we need detailed data to verify Tesla’s statistics.
Tesla finally got its foot in Europe’s door, but only after the usual parade of testing, scrutiny, and bureaucratic suspicion. For a company that loves to move fast and promise the future early, this is a reminder that in Europe, the future shows up only after the paperwork clears.
However, this also isn’t Europe swinging the doors open to robotaxis and unsupervised self-driving. For a company that loves to move fast and promise the future early, this is a reminder that the U.S. and Europe operate quite differently, with a lot more testing, scrutiny, and bureaucratic suspicion.
RDW’s approval is significant because it is the first formal European approval for Tesla FSD. But to go EU-wide, the Dutch authority must now forward the approval and its findings to the European Commission, and then member states will vote on whether to extend it to the entire bloc.
