FSD & Autopilot

Tesla switched on FSD (Supervised) in Lithuania on 20 May 2026, making it the second EU country to allow the system on public roads. The Lithuanian Transport Safety Administration recognised the Dutch RDW type approval under EU mutual-recognition rules — a faster path than the independent national testing programmes underway in Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. Lithuanian owners receive the same FSD v14.3.3 stack now shipping in the Netherlands.

Andrej Karpathy — the OpenAI co-founder who led Tesla's Autopilot and FSD programmes from 2017 to 2022 — has joined Anthropic's pre-training team, reporting to team lead Nick Joseph. The hire intensifies an already-sharp talent war between Anthropic and OpenAI, and lands at a moment when Tesla is leaning more publicly than ever on the AI roadmap Karpathy helped lay down.

Teslarati reported on 18 May 2026 that Tesla's internal Robotaxi app version 26.4.5 introduces a high-security command capable of freezing a vehicle's ability to drive — pulling it from the fleet and preventing it from being put into gear even with valid keys — alongside new remote operations and safety-protocol code. The update lands as Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet has grown from 9 cars at the start of April to 39 by mid-May 2026.

Speaking on Monday 18 May 2026, Elon Musk said Tesla's driverless Robotaxi service will reach roughly a quarter to half of the US population by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval — with no-safety-monitor vehicles becoming widespread later in 2026. Tesla already operates fully unsupervised vehicles in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, and is targeting four more cities in the first half of the year.

Two Grünheide-built Tesla Model Y vehicles are running Europe's first public FSD (Supervised) shuttle service in Germany's Eifel region, ferrying students and seniors for free between schools, doctors and home. The pilot operates ahead of any German FSD type approval.

Tesla's latest FSD release changes how the system handles inattentive drivers — instead of slowing to a stop in the live lane, the car now actively looks for a safe place to pull over and park. Tesla also relaxes the strike lockout so drivers can re-engage FSD immediately after the car parks.

Tesla retroactively unredacted every Robotaxi crash narrative filed with US safety regulators, exposing two low-speed crashes in which human teleoperators — not the self-driving system — were in control of the vehicle.

Tesla has quietly removed Basic Autopilot from the Dutch configurator. New Model 3 and Model Y buyers in the Netherlands now see only FSD (Supervised) at €99 per month — the basic, free traffic-aware cruise + Autosteer tier that came with every Tesla since 2019 is gone.

Flemish Minister Annick De Ridder has cleared Tesla to begin supervised Full Self-Driving testing on Belgian public roads after an accelerated screening, making Belgium the second EU country after the Netherlands to authorise the system for live testing.

A champagne-gold Tesla Cybercab prototype was rear-ended during on-road testing, the first publicly known crash involving Tesla's purpose-built robotaxi. The Cybercab was stopped when struck and pushed into the vehicle ahead, mirroring incidents commonly seen in other autonomous fleets.

Newly built Model Ys at Tesla's Grünheide plant have self-driven a combined 93,000 miles (roughly 150,000 km) on Full Self-Driving since October 2025 — entirely on private factory ground, in a country where FSD is not yet street-legal.

Ireland's Department of Transport has confirmed active discussions with Tesla on approving Full Self-Driving (Supervised), making Ireland the next candidate to join the Netherlands as an EU country with regulator-cleared FSD.

Less than a month after Dutch regulators approved Tesla's FSD Supervised on 10 April 2026, Tesla owners in the Netherlands have already driven 10 million kilometres on the system — roughly 430,000 km per day across an estimated 4,400 to 8,800 vehicles. The data feeds Tesla's neural network training and gives EU regulators an early read on real-world adoption.

Tesla's unsupervised Robotaxi service in Texas began operating in the evening on 4 May 2026 and the fully driverless Model Y fleet has grown to 29 vehicles across Austin, Houston and Dallas.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving fleet logged its ten-billionth supervised mile on 3 May 2026, hitting the data threshold Elon Musk publicly named in January as the minimum for safe unsupervised driving. The fleet is now adding roughly 28.8 million miles per day, but Tesla has not removed the supervision requirement and Musk's current public timeline for Unsupervised FSD is Q4 2026 at the earliest.

Tesla will stop selling outright Full Self-Driving licences for €7,500 in the Netherlands on May 15, 2026, just weeks after Dutch regulators approved FSD (Supervised). Owners must order before then and take delivery by June 30 to keep the lifetime option. After that, the only way to use FSD in the Netherlands will be the €99 monthly subscription.

Tesla replaced the catch-all 'Other' reason in the Full Self-Driving disengagement menu with a dedicated 'Navigation' tag in firmware 2026.2.9.9 (FSD v14.3.2 wave two). The change isolates map-related interventions so the AI team can prioritise routing fixes separately from driving-policy issues.

Tesla will not expand its commercial Robotaxi fleet at scale until FSD v15 launches, and is instead seeding small validation fleets in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona to map local driving conditions ahead of the broader rollout.

Tesla confirmed at its Q1 2026 earnings call that legacy HW3 vehicles will receive a stripped-down FSD V14 Lite build, with the US rollout targeted for late June 2026 and international markets — including Europe — to follow once regional approvals close.

The Strängnäs municipality in Sweden has granted Tesla a one-year permit to test Full Self-Driving on local public roads. The approval covers municipal streets only — Tesla already has clearance for state roads — and cannot be used until Sweden's Transport Agency, Transportstyrelsen, signs off on the operational details.

On the Q1 2026 earnings call (22 April), Elon Musk admitted Hardware 3 Teslas cannot achieve Unsupervised Full Self-Driving and offered a discounted AI4 trade-in. Autopilot lead Ashok Elluswamy confirmed a stripped-down FSD v14 Lite for HW3 cars by late June. The European HW3 collective claim now has its smoking gun.

Tesla has launched its Robotaxi ride-hailing app on the Google Play Store in the United States, ending nearly a year of iPhone-only access. The Android release coincides with an expanding unsupervised Robotaxi service across Texas and broader U.S. markets, though European availability is not yet on the roadmap.

On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Tesla confirmed that Hardware 3 vehicles cannot achieve Unsupervised FSD because HW3 has one-eighth of HW4's memory bandwidth. The company will offer a hardware retrofit via dedicated 'microfactories' in major cities and will ship an FSD V14 Lite build to HW3 cars by the end of June 2026.

Spain's national traffic authority confirmed Tesla is testing FSD (Supervised) on Spanish public roads with 30 vehicles that have logged nearly 80,000 km since November 2025, with zero reported incidents. Commercial availability for customers is not yet on the table.