Tesla's hard-won European approval for Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is under new scrutiny after a Reuters investigation reported that the company submitted self-published safety statistics — figures independent researchers describe as misleading — to regulators while seeking clearance across the continent.
What Reuters Found
According to the investigation, Tesla gave authorities in the Netherlands and Sweden statistics drawn from its own data as it pursued wider European approval. The claims were striking: that FSD-equipped vehicles travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the fleet average, that the system is up to ten times safer than an average human driver, and — on one slide — that FSD could have prevented 32,000 deaths and 1.9 million injuries.
Independent traffic-safety researchers who reviewed the figures for Reuters judged the underlying assumptions and comparisons to be unrealistic. The core objection is familiar to anyone who follows autonomous-driving statistics: comparing a system used selectively, on easier roads and in good conditions, against the entire human crash record is not a like-for-like comparison.
The Netherlands Defends Its Approval
The story matters in Europe because the Dutch vehicle authority, the RDW, approved FSD (Supervised) on 10 April 2026 in a European first — the decision that opened the door to the country-by-country approvals that have followed. After the Reuters report, the Netherlands' transport minister stated that the RDW had not relied on Tesla's submitted statistics as the basis for that approval, saying the regulator reached its own judgement that the system would contribute positively to road safety.
That distinction matters. If the approval rested on independent assessment rather than Tesla's marketing figures, the regulatory foundation is sturdier than the headline suggests — but the episode still raises the question of what evidence regulators should accept from a manufacturer making safety claims about its own product.
Pressure in the United States Too
The scrutiny is not confined to Europe. Citing the Reuters report, US senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, calling the analysis behind Tesla's FSD safety statistics "weak and misleading" and describing it as an urgent safety problem. They asked the agency to review the claims.
Why It Matters for European Owners
For European drivers, this is the substance beneath the steady drumbeat of approval announcements. FSD (Supervised) is spreading nation by nation across the continent, building on the wave of approvals that began with the Dutch RDW. Each of those clearances rests on the premise that the system genuinely improves safety. If the headline figures behind that premise do not survive independent scrutiny, regulators may demand stricter, standardised evidence before the next approval — and owners deserve to know whether the safety case for the technology in their car is as strong as the marketing suggests.
Update: 2026-06-17
On 12 June 2026, the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), a Brussels-based road-safety body, wrote to the transport ministers of nearly all EU member states, urging them not to recognise Tesla's provisional FSD (Supervised) approval for their own territory until a series of safety questions are answered independently and in public. The ETSC argues such claims should be checked by qualified university researchers rather than taken from the manufacturer, and it had already put nine questions to the Dutch RDW in April. The RDW pushed back: Dutch transport minister Karremans said the regulator relied on its own research, not Tesla's marketing — more than 1.6 million km of road testing, 13,000 customer ride-alongs and 4,500 closed-track scenarios over 18 months, meeting more than 400 compliance requirements.