The Dutch vehicle authority RDW approved Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) for public roads in April 2026, making the Netherlands the first EU country to do so. It has never published the reasoning. According to email correspondence obtained by Reuters through a public-records request, that is because Tesla has been pressing the RDW to keep the documentation confidential since late 2024, and the regulator has agreed — citing the protection of Tesla's commercial secrets.
What the emails show
The correspondence covers the period from late 2024, when Tesla first approached the RDW to begin the approval process, through the assessment itself. Across it, Tesla presses the regulator to treat the safety review material as confidential business information. The RDW went along with the automaker's confidentiality requirements and has declined public-records requests for the underlying detail on that basis.
The result is an approval that Dutch road users cannot inspect. The RDW has said that FSD is safe enough for Dutch roads; it will not say what it measured, what it found, or where the system's limits sat.
This is the second Reuters finding on the same approval
In June, Reuters reported that Tesla had presented European regulators — the Netherlands and Sweden among them — with FSD safety statistics that overstated the system's record, including a claim that wide FSD deployment could save 32,000 lives. That review found several invalid comparisons underlying the numbers, of the kind that compare highway-biased assisted driving against all-conditions human driving without correcting for road type or vehicle age.
The RDW declined to comment on the specific problems Reuters identified. Its position is that it "does not rely on marketing claims or external statistics" and performs its own tests, analyses and verifications. The agency has separately said its assessment involved roughly 3,000 hours of testing and 24 million kilometres without incident.
Both statements may be true at once. The difficulty is that nobody outside the RDW and Tesla can check, because the material that would settle it is the material being withheld.
Why this matters beyond the Netherlands
The Dutch approval is not a Dutch matter. The RDW is the authority pursuing EU-wide approval for FSD, and under EU type-approval rules a national authority's sign-off is the route by which a system reaches the rest of the single market. Every European driver who eventually shares a road with an FSD-equipped Tesla inherits the Dutch assessment, whether or not their own regulator ever repeats it.
That is also why the confidentiality question is not merely procedural. France has already refused to approve FSD and is holding out for an EU-wide process rather than accepting a national sign-off it cannot audit. Denmark and Belgium approved on the Dutch precedent.
The transparency gap is the story
Commercial confidentiality in type approval is normal. Manufacturers routinely withhold calibration data, sensor specifications and control-software detail, and no regulator publishes those. What is unusual here is the scope: not the engineering internals but the safety conclusion and the evidence for it.
Tesla has published its own European FSD safety figures, claiming the system is 5.2 times safer than manual driving across 65 million kilometres. Those are self-reported. The independent assessment that would corroborate or contradict them exists, was paid for with public money, and is sealed.
For owners in the five European countries where FSD (Supervised) is now approved, nothing changes today. For anyone trying to judge whether the approval was sound, there is currently no way to do it.