The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) — the Brussels-based umbrella group for Europe's national road-safety organisations — has asked the governments of nearly every EU member state to slow down before they sign off on Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised). In letters sent on 12 June 2026 to transport ministers across the bloc, the ETSC urged them to "seek answers and evidence to several key questions related to the safety of FSD (Supervised)" before deciding whether to accept the system's provisional European approval for their own roads.
The intervention lands in the middle of a fast-moving approval wave. The Netherlands cleared FSD (Supervised) first, in April, and Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium have followed — five countries in roughly two months. The council deliberately addressed its letter to the governments that have not yet accepted the approval, leaving out the five that already have.
How one approval can spread across the continent
The reason a handful of national decisions matters for all of Europe lies in the approval mechanism. The Dutch road authority, the RDW, granted FSD (Supervised) a provisional EU type-approval on 10 April 2026. Under EU rules, that provisional approval can be turned into a bloc-wide measure through the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV) — a committee of national experts that can, in effect, make a system legal across the single market.
The ETSC's sharpest criticism is aimed at this process. It describes the TCMV as meeting behind closed doors with "no formal route in for civil society, road safety experts, or anyone else," warning that an unelected committee could make hands-off urban driving the European norm without any public debate. That scrutiny has intensified in recent days: as TeslAnt reported, a Reuters investigation found Tesla had given European regulators misleading FSD safety data while pursuing approval.
The safety case the council is making
At the heart of the council's argument is a well-documented problem with partial automation: drivers struggle to supervise a system that mostly works on its own. "The more capable an assisted driving system appears, the worse drivers become at supervising it," the ETSC wrote, calling humans "notoriously ill-suited" to passive monitoring. In-car driver-monitoring cameras, it added, "can blunt this effect; they cannot eliminate it" — and TeslAnt recently covered just how easily Tesla's cabin camera can be fooled.
What the ETSC actually wants
Importantly, the council is not calling for a ban. It wants the European Commission to convene open, public discussions on the wider rollout of Driver Control Assistance Systems (DCAS) — the regulatory category FSD falls under — and to hold off on any binding implementing act until that deliberation is complete. The message is pause and verify, not prohibit.
What it means for European owners
For drivers in countries still weighing the decision — including Germany and the Czech Republic, whose ministries have publicly signalled caution — the letter raises the odds of a slower, more conditional rollout. It does not unwind the five approvals already granted, and owners in those markets keep the feature they have. But it frames the central question for the months ahead: should Europe's shift to hands-off driving rest on independently verified evidence, or on the manufacturer's own figures?