Germany has said for the first time where it stands on Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and the answer is: undecided, but not opposed. On the same day, the European Transport Safety Council asked EU member states to throw the application out.

What Berlin actually said

The Federal Ministry for Transport (BMDV) describes its position as "technology-open and safety-oriented". The Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) is in direct talks with the Dutch RDW — the authority that authorised FSD in Europe this spring — and with Tesla, working through the technical documentation before Germany settles on how it will vote.

That review has been running since July, when a transport-ministry state secretary said Germany would not decide before the EU committee had voted. New is the disposition attached to it: not an endorsement, and not a decision, but the first time the largest vote outstanding against the application has called itself open to it.

The ministry attached three reservations:

  • The speed offset. FSD can be set to exceed the detected limit by up to 50%.
  • Urban use. Whether a driver-assistance system of this capability belongs on dense inner-city streets at all.
  • Liability. Driver responsibility "remains absolute" — in a malfunction, the fault sits with the driver, not the manufacturer.

Against that, German regulators accepted that FSD appears able to handle a wide variety of traffic situations, including complex city driving.

On provenance: the position surfaced as a reply from the BMDV's citizen-service desk, posted on X on 29 September 2026 — official correspondence, not a press release, and binding on nothing.

The safety lobby escalated

The same day, the European Transport Safety Council urged member states to reject the Dutch Article 39 request outright — a harder line than in June, when it asked governments to pause and seek evidence rather than prohibit. Its speed objection dates from that same intervention.

What is new is the legal theory. Tesla did not list the speed offset among the functions it considered to need an exemption under Article 39. The ETSC reads that as Tesla treating the feature as already compliant, and says it is not: the rules bar a driver-settable default offset above the speed the system itself has determined. On a 50 km/h road the offset permits 75; in a 30 zone, 45.

The council also objected to "contextual max speed", which lets the car take its ceiling from the traffic around it rather than from the posted limit.

Why Germany is the whole story

The vote is now a December matter — the 6 October Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles meeting is a consultation, not a count of hands. Authorisation needs 15 member states and 65% of the EU population. Germany, Italy and Spain have not recognised the Dutch approval and France has refused; together they are close to 58% of the Union, so the threshold cannot be reached while all four stay out.

Germany is the largest, and a German yes is the only single move that brings the threshold within reach — which is why a citizen-service email saying "technology-open" carries further than Croatia becoming the eighth country to recognise the approval a day earlier.

What changes for owners

Both interventions land on the same feature from opposite directions. Sweden has asked the EU to reject the application unless the derogation is dropped, and a Brussels test found FSD over the limit in 55% of the 30 km/h segments it drove. The Netherlands authorised FSD without requiring an exemption for the offset; Germany, Sweden, France and the ETSC now all say that was the wrong call.

Nothing changes today. FSD (Supervised) stays available in the eight countries that recognise the Dutch authorisation and unavailable in the other nineteen. But the December question has narrowed: not whether FSD can drive, which Germany concedes it can, but whether a car may be configured to break the speed limit on purpose.