Germany's ADAC put Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) through a two-hour drive in Copenhagen and published the result on 6 October 2026. Its verdict is in the headline it chose: Würde das System den Führerschein bestehen? — would the system pass the driving test?
It would not. ADAC counts three faults in two hours that are automatic fails in a German practical exam.
Why the test happened in Denmark
ADAC is Germany's automobile club and Europe's largest, and it cannot test FSD at home. Germany has not authorised it. Denmark is one of the eight countries that recognise the Dutch RDW authorisation, so a German organisation wanting to drive the system legally has to leave the country to do it — which is itself a description of where this file stands.
The car was a Model 3. The driver was ADAC engineer Andreas Rigling. The route was urban Copenhagen plus surrounding roads, over roughly two hours.
The three exam failures
| Fault | Why it is an automatic fail |
|---|---|
| Ran a red light | The most serious single error in the German practical test |
| Wrong lane choice | Misreading the required lane at a junction |
| Wrong motorway entry, then crossed a solid line correcting it | Two errors chained — the correction compounded the mistake |
ADAC's own wording for the red light carries an exclamation mark: "Überfahren einer roten Ampel (!)". Three such errors in a two-hour drive is not a marginal result.
Separately, the car used a reserved bus lane it was not entitled to, and abandoned a parking attempt after repeated manoeuvres, leaving the Model 3 partly in the roadway.
The driver monitoring failed twice over
Two findings concern the part of the system that is supposed to catch all of the above: the driver.
The cabin camera took several seconds to react once Rigling's eyes left the road. And mirrored sunglasses defeated it entirely — wearing them, he got no attention warnings at all.
That matters more than any single driving error. FSD (Supervised) is a Level 2+ system and its entire safety case rests on a human watching it. A monitor that can be switched off with sunglasses is not a monitor. It is also the exact objection European regulators have raised about driver-monitoring design generally, now demonstrated on the car at the centre of the EU approval fight.
What ADAC praised
The report is not a hatchet job, and reading it as one misses the finding. ADAC calls the system an "impressive assistant" and singles out its handling of things that are genuinely hard: two-lane roundabouts, narrow country roads with oncoming traffic, tight streets and alleys. Its phrase for the pattern is that the car was remarkable at complex tasks and stumbled on seemingly simple ones.
That asymmetry is the useful observation. A system that fails on the hard parts is easy to distrust. A system that handles the hard parts and then runs a red light is harder to supervise, because it teaches the driver to relax at exactly the wrong moment.
The name is the recommendation
ADAC's closing argument is not about the driving at all. It is that calling a Level 2+ assistant "Full Self-Driving" produces overconfidence, and it asks for clearer naming and plainer communication about where responsibility sits.
That lands in a live political argument. Germany's transport ministry made the same point this week while setting out what it wants before it will back EU-wide authorisation, and the speed-limit behaviour ADAC saw is the same objection a Brussels road-safety test raised when it found FSD over the limit in 55% of the 30 km/h segments it drove.
What it means for European owners
Nothing changes today. FSD (Supervised) stays available in the eight countries that recognise the Dutch authorisation — Croatia was the eighth — and unavailable in the other nineteen. The committee vote is a December matter.
What changed is the evidence base. Until now the European case against FSD rested on regulator correspondence and one city's speed measurements. ADAC is a consumer organisation with 22.7 million members and a long record of testing Tesla hardware and publishing unflattering results. Its report will be read in the ministries that still have to vote.