Poland has become the second European country in a week shown declining to take the national route to Tesla's Full Self-Driving. Correspondence reported by the Polish outlet elektrowoz.pl on 28 September 2026 shows that talks happened, that they went nowhere, and why.
What Tesla asked for, and when
On 14 April 2026, Tesla formally asked Poland to recognise the temporary Article 39 approval that the Dutch RDW had granted FSD (Supervised). Article 39 is the EU type-approval route for technologies not yet covered by existing rules; it is the same mechanism Ford used for BlueCruise. An approval issued under it is provisional and valid in the issuing member state, so Tesla has been working country by country to have it honoured elsewhere.
In Poland the decision would belong to the Director of the Transportowy Dozór Techniczny (TDT), the transport technical inspection body. Artur Marciniszyn of TDT's vehicle homologation department took part in the exchanges. TDT's position is procedural and blunt: no documents have been submitted by the manufacturer that would allow any decision to be made.
The objections on the record
The transport ministry consulted the Motor Transport Institute (ITS), which said FSD had not been tested in Polish conditions and argued that local testing is necessary because road conditions differ by country. Polish intersections, roundabouts and variable traffic management were named as the things a system would have to demonstrate it can handle.
Three other concerns surfaced in the correspondence: vehicle modifications on Polish roads, the possibility of drivers forcing the system to exceed speed limits, and the fact that FSD (Supervised) stops functioning once a car crosses the border out of an approving state.
The speeding objection is not hypothetical. A Brussels non-profit found the system exceeded the limit in 55% of 30 km/h segments over a 400 km test, and Sweden has already urged the EU to reject supervised FSD unless the behaviour changes.
The detail that gives the story away
Tesla's representative said FSD (Supervised) "was not tested in Poland due to formal reasons" and offered to organise system presentations in Berlin instead. A manufacturer asking a regulator to recognise an approval, while proposing that the regulator watch the system work in another country, is the clearest measure of how far the process had got.
One further limit is worth noting for owners: only cars homologated after July 2023 would be eligible for FSD (Supervised), so a recognition decision would not reach the whole Polish Tesla fleet even if it came.
Where this leaves the national route in Europe
The pattern is now familiar. Ireland's Department of Transport said approval must come at EU level days ago, despite Tesla naming it as next. The Dutch approval that started all of this was itself granted after Tesla pressed the RDW to keep its safety assessment confidential.
That leaves the bloc-wide vote as the real gate, and it has slipped to the December TCMV agenda at the earliest. Poland's answer is not a rejection of FSD. It is a statement that Tesla has not yet filed anything for Poland to reject.