Tesla handed self-published “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics to road regulators in the Netherlands and Sweden that independent traffic-safety researchers describe as misleading marketing, according to correspondence obtained by Reuters through public records requests and published June 15, 2026. The figures are the same disputed numbers a Reuters examination took apart in late May, when reviewers found the company’s claim that FSD is “up to 10 times safer than human drivers” rested on invalid comparisons. Ten of the eleven traffic-safety researchers who reviewed Tesla’s methodology for Reuters called the statistics misleading marketing rather than a serious safety study.

We have tracked this approval campaign since the Dutch authority cleared the software on April 10, 2026, and the new documents change the framing. This is no longer Elon Musk posting a chart on X. It is a formal regulatory submission built on statistics that those reviewers told Reuters do not survive independent scrutiny.

The stakes are commercial as much as technical. Tesla has said European FSD approval matters to vehicle sales in a market where its volumes fell hard in 2025.

The Numbers Tesla Sent to Brussels and Stockholm

Tesla’s submissions repeated U.S. marketing figures that researchers say collapse under scrutiny. The company approached RDW, the Netherlands Vehicle Authority (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer), in late 2024, and a November 2024 letter linked to its safety report with the claim that wider FSD use “leads to safer roads.” After the Dutch decision, a Tesla policy manager, Ivan Komusanac, emailed Swedish regulators a slide deck asserting that Teslas on FSD travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average U.S. driver.

The same presentation claimed FSD could have saved 32,000 lives and prevented 1.9 million injuries. Researchers told Reuters those numbers rest on “the unrealistic assumption that every U.S. vehicle, including freight trucks and crash-prone motorcycles, would be replaced by an FSD-enabled Tesla car,” with each one at least seven times safer than the vehicle it replaced. The underlying method compares Tesla crashes that set off airbags against a federal rate covering far milder collisions, and benchmarks Tesla’s young fleet against a much older national average. University of Michigan researcher Marco Benedetti found that doing the comparison correctly, airbag crashes for Teslas against airbag crashes for all vehicles, drops the result from “10 times safer” to roughly three times farther between crashes. That figure is still skewed by the fleet-age gap between Tesla’s 4.1-year average and the 12.8-year U.S. average.

How the Dutch Approval Opened the Door

RDW approved FSD (Supervised) under a recognized European framework after more than a year and a half of testing, then moved to seek bloc-wide recognition. The April 10, 2026 type approval, granted under UN Regulation 171 for Driver Control Assistance Systems plus an Article 39 exemption, made the Netherlands the first European country to authorize the Level 2 system for public roads, as EVXL reported the day it landed. RDW told Reuters it “does not rely on marketing claims or external statistics” and runs its own tests on public roads and test tracks. The agency declined to say whether it assessed the validity of Tesla’s U.S. numbers.

That distinction matters. RDW has stated the European software differs from the U.S. build, so American crash statistics do not describe the system Dutch drivers actually run. The regulator reviewed the EU-specific version, not the data Tesla put in its lobbying deck. Three days after the national decision, RDW notified the European Commission to begin the path toward EU-wide recognition, a step we covered on April 13.

Why the EU-Wide Vote Is the Real Test

Continent-wide legality requires a qualified-majority vote that Tesla’s marketing figures will not win on their own. Under the EU’s double-majority rule, 55% of member states representing 65% of the bloc’s population must vote yes in the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles for FSD to become legal across all 27 states. No vote has been scheduled, with committee meetings expected later in 2026. In the meantime, individual countries can approve the technology nationally, and several already have. FSD (Supervised) is now live through national recognitions in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Belgium and Denmark, with Denmark clearing it on June 9 to become the fourth European market to do so, as we documented this month.

The lobbying is not confined to Tesla’s own filings. A regulator in Greece said last month the country aims to approve FSD, citing data “from the other side of the Atlantic” showing a drop in accidents; the transport ministry would not confirm whether that data came from Tesla’s report. Regulators elsewhere have been flooded with owner emails citing the company’s statistics. One Norwegian driver argued the system could “reduce traffic accidents by up to 90%.”

Regulators and Watchdogs Push Back

The pushback centers on where the data came from, not on whether driver assistance can help. Stein-Helge Mundal of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen) told several Tesla enthusiasts the company’s figures “are self-produced,” which makes correlation with official accident data difficult. Anders Eriksson at the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) said regulators “look beyond headline figures” and weigh the full body of evidence rather than aggregated claims.

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), a Brussels-based non-profit founded in 1993 that advises the European Commission and Parliament on road safety, was blunter. Spokesperson Dudley Curtis said the group is “certainly concerned” about the unreliable data, and that Tesla should hand it “to a university, have it independently verified by a qualified researcher, and then let’s talk.” Tesla did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The Sales Pressure Behind the Push

Tesla’s European troubles give the FSD campaign added urgency. EU registrations fell about 39% in the first eleven months of 2025, to roughly 129,000 units, even as the overall European EV market grew 27%, amid protests over Musk’s political activities, including his backing of far-right parties such as Germany’s AfD. Over the same stretch, BYD registrations in the EU rose 240%, and the Chinese maker has overtaken Tesla in several European markets. In the Netherlands, Tesla now offers FSD (Supervised) at €99 per month, or €49 for owners who previously bought Enhanced Autopilot, and has begun steering European buyers toward subscriptions by removing the one-time purchase option.

The friction is not new. In November 2025, RDW publicly denied Tesla’s claim that approval had been “committed” and asked fans to stop calling its offices, an episode we reported at the time. The pattern of bold claims meeting regulatory caution has held through the entire process.

EVXL’s Take

This fits a pattern we have flagged repeatedly: the FSD technology may be genuinely good, but Tesla’s statistics about it keep failing independent review. When we covered the Dutch approval on April 10, we made a point that reads as prophetic now. American safety numbers do not describe the European build RDW actually evaluated, so anyone using them to judge the EU system is comparing the wrong things. The Reuters documents show Tesla did exactly that, in writing, to two governments.

There is a real tension worth naming. A well-supervised Level 2 system can cut crashes, and Europe’s slow, evidence-first process is the right way to learn by how much. The problem is that Tesla answered a technical question with a sales chart. As we wrote on February 10 about the UNECE’s outcome-based Safety Case framework, regulatory doors that swing open on weak evidence can swing shut just as fast. Every national approval granted so far carries a clause that one negative Commission decision can void.

My prediction: the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles will not deliver an EU-wide yes vote before the end of 2026. The mix of self-produced data, ETSC opposition, and Scandinavian skepticism over speeding and icy-road behavior gives hesitant member states ample cover to wait, even as the national-recognition map keeps filling in country by country.

Source: Reuters (reuters.com).

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.