Tesla pushed Dutch regulator to ease up on its self-driving review
Emails show Tesla fought a safety-review bill and timeline with the Netherlands' RDW, which approved FSD and is now lobbying the whole EU to follow.
What happened: Reuters obtained hundreds of pages of emails between Tesla and regulators in seven European countries. The clearest thread is with the Netherlands' RDW, the agency reviewing Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Tesla called a 2024 testing deadline mission critical, disputed a 365,000 euro review invoice, and pushed to limit on-site inspections and a planned meeting on its over-the-air software updates. RDW ultimately eased parts of its process, approved the system, and is now asking the EU to approve it bloc-wide, with a vote possible as early as December.
Why it matters: RDW's approval is the legal foundation for Tesla's entire FSD rollout across Europe. If regulators scaled back scrutiny under commercial pressure, every country relying on that approval inherits whatever was skipped. RDW also will not publish its own test data, citing Tesla trade secrets, meaning the public cannot check a review that will shape driver-assistance rules for 450 million people. Tesla's safety claims have also reached political fights, with ministers in France and elsewhere accused of costing lives for delaying approval.
How the safety claims hold up: Tesla's main evidence is a European study comparing FSD driving to its own fleet data. Seven traffic-safety researchers told Reuters the FSD sample, tens or hundreds of thousands of miles driven largely by Tesla's professional testers, is too small to compare against hundreds of millions of miles of ordinary driving. Instead of crashes, Tesla tracked proxies like hard braking, hard cornering and horn use. Tesla's own fine print says the results should not be read as proof of cause and effect, yet the company has publicly tied the study to claims that European road deaths are largely preventable.
The rollout: Eight countries allow FSD so far: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia, mostly small markets. Germany, Italy and Spain have not signed on, and Sweden wants Tesla to drop the feature that lets FSD exceed posted speed limits before it will agree. France initially refused in July, then its transport minister described a constructive exchange with Elon Musk weeks later. Musk has also asked Tesla owners directly to pressure regulators, and public records show European officials were flooded with owner emails repeating the company's safety claims.