Not self-driving

Tesla's supervised Full Self-Driving is on European roads. It is not on Europe's. Five countries have it. The rest of the Union, and the UK, do not. The car is not driving itself. The Dutch regulator said that in public on the day it said yes.

On 10 April the RDW, the Netherlands' type-approval authority, issued a European type approval with provisional validity in the Netherlands for FSD Supervised. Elon Musk posted congratulations the same day. Tesla started pushing the software to Dutch customers within days. Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium later recognised the Dutch certificate. Tesla's own FSD page now lists those five as the European markets where a customer can actually use it. Germany is not on the list. Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland are not. France has said no. The United Kingdom is a waitlist.

What you get is SAE Level 2. The RDW's words: a vehicle with FSD Supervised is not self-driving. It is a driver-controlled assistance system. The driver remains responsible and must always remain in control. Hands do not have to be on the wheel, but they have to be able to take over immediately. Cabin sensors watch whether your eyes are on the road and whether your hands are available. Keep ignoring the warnings and the system will not stay on. You cannot read a newspaper. Tesla's own Article 39 dashboard, published 1 September, is asking Brussels to let it withhold hands-on requests on highway and non-highway roads so long as it can still watch your eyes. Eyes on, hands off, legal responsibility still yours.

The software is not the American one. The RDW said that too: the US FSD Supervised version is not comparable. Europe is UN R-171 DCAS, with exemptions Tesla wants under Article 39 of Regulation 2018/858. One of those exemptions is the one France named. Tesla wants the car to match surrounding traffic even when that means going faster than the detected speed limit. French transport minister Philippe Tabarot, on 22 July, said the safety trade-offs were not yet enough to authorise it as it currently stands. The system, he said, allows speeding. That is a no for now, not a never, and it is the largest EU country to say it out loud.

Hardware is HW4. Tesla's regulatory file is explicit: the requested European launch configuration is FSD Supervised, HW4. HW3 owners who paid years ago did not get a European customer build in that file. Tesla has talked about a v14 Lite for older computers in the US and South Korea. Do not assume that arrived here.

Price, in the Netherlands, is a subscription: €99 a month on Tesla's Dutch FSD page. There was a one-time buy at launch. Tesla ended it. New buyers in the Netherlands are on the monthly plan. The UK page does not show a price, because there is nothing to switch on.

The safety argument Tesla is taking to Brussels is its own telemetry. On 1 September Tesla Europe said FSD is used by more than 70,000 customers in the five countries, more than a million kilometres a day, and 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometres on public EU roads. Reuters restated Tesla's own counts: three highway collisions and nine off-highway under FSD, against 137 and 490 in manual. Tesla's dashboard also says the fleet studies do not control for traffic, weather, time of day, or how hard the drive was, and that drivers choose when to engage, so you are looking at an association, not a randomised experiment. Reuters had already, in June, called Tesla's self-published comparisons invalid. In August it reported that Tesla had pressed the RDW to keep the safety-case documents confidential, and that the Dutch authority will not publish why it concluded the system is safe. Norway's road agency told Reuters the Dutch assessment data is not the same as what Tesla publishes. Write 4.1× as Tesla's number. Do not write it as a regulator's.

What Tesla wants next is an EU-wide yes. That takes the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, a qualified majority: 15 of 27 states representing 65 percent of the EU population. Tesla says a vote could come on 6 October. That is Tesla's date. Reuters reported it as Tesla's claim. A June meeting discussed the file and did not vote. If Brussels eventually recognises the Dutch approval, FSD Supervised becomes available across the Union without each capital repeating the Dutch test. Unsupervised FSD is not a European product. Robotaxi is not. What is on the road in five countries is a Level 2 system with a Dutch stamp, a monthly price, a hardware gate, and a fight in Brussels about whether matching the fast lane counts as safety. The driver is still the driver. The RDW said that first.

Sources: RDW, 10 Apr, Tesla Article 39 dashboard, Tesla.nl FSD, Tesla UK FSD, Reuters 1 Sep, Le Figaro, 23 Jul, Tesla Europe.