Dutch transport minister Vincent Karremans told parliament on Tuesday, June 16, that the RDW did not lean on Tesla’s own safety figures when it approved Full Self-Driving (Supervised) for Dutch roads. The denial answers a Reuters investigation published the day before, which reported that Tesla handed regulators in the Netherlands and Sweden self-published statistics that independent researchers called misleading marketing. Karremans drew a hard line between what a manufacturer submits and what a regulator decides.

“We have asked the RDW about that, and the answer is that this was not the case,” he said, adding that the approval rested on the agency’s own independently verified testing. The political stakes are real. The RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer, the Dutch vehicle authority) issued the first European type approval for Tesla FSD on April 10, and it is now pushing for the same clearance across all 27 EU member states. If the data behind that decision looks tainted, the whole bloc-wide campaign inherits the doubt. I have tracked this approval since the RDW first denied Tesla’s premature claims in November 2025, and the gap between what Tesla announces and what regulators actually sign keeps reappearing.

Karremans Separates Tesla’s Submissions From The RDW’s Decision

Karremans conceded in parliament that Tesla’s presented statistics could be questioned, but said those numbers had not formed the basis of the RDW’s approval. That distinction is the entire defense. It accepts the premise of the Reuters reporting while denying its consequence for the Dutch decision.

The minister oversees infrastructure and faced the questions after the June 15 Reuters story landed in the Dutch press. The RDW backed his account in its own emailed statement, telling Reuters it notes manufacturer information but bases decisions solely on an independent assessment under European regulations. The agency added that it had not relied on Tesla-submitted data in its evaluation, and that it could not immediately confirm Tesla’s separate mileage claims.

EVXL covered the Reuters investigation on June 15. The documents, obtained through public records requests, show Tesla approached the RDW in late 2024 and, in a November 2024 letter, linked to its safety report with the claim that wider FSD use leads to safer roads. After the Dutch approval, a Tesla policy manager emailed Swedish regulators a slide deck asserting FSD-equipped cars travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average U.S. driver, plus a claim the system could have prevented 32,000 deaths. Ten of eleven traffic-safety researchers Reuters consulted called the underlying comparisons unrealistic.

The Minister Cites 24 Million Incident-Free Miles On Dutch Roads

Karremans told parliament that FSD-equipped Teslas had driven 24 million miles on Dutch roads without any noteworthy incident. That figure tracks closely with a Tesla Europe post on X from June 9, which claimed 23.6 million kilometers, roughly 15 million miles, in the Netherlands with no highway collisions and three crashes on smaller roads between April 10 and June 5.

The mileage gap between the two figures matters more than it looks. The minister’s 24 million miles and Tesla’s 15 million miles describe the same period but disagree by nine million. Neither he nor the RDW sourced the larger number, and the agency said it could not confirm Tesla’s count. A defense built partly on a mileage figure the regulator will not verify is a softer defense than it first sounds.

FSD (Supervised) remains a Level 2 driver assistance system. It steers, accelerates, and brakes, and the human behind the wheel must watch the road and stay ready to take over. Incident-free mileage on a supervised system measures the driver-plus-software combination, not the software alone, which is exactly the kind of comparison the Reuters researchers flagged as easy to misread.

Safety Campaigners Want The EU-Wide Vote Paused

The European Transport Safety Council has pushed the other direction. On June 12, the ETSC wrote to transport ministers across nearly every EU member state, urging them to demand evidence on FSD safety before recognizing the provisional Dutch approval for their own territories.

The council had already sent the RDW nine detailed questions in April, covering the evidence behind the decision, the driver-monitoring system, and how U.S. federal investigations into FSD factored into the review. It also asked the European Commission to pause the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles process until those questions get public answers. The RDW approved the software under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption, after more than 18 months of track and road testing.

The approval has spread fast despite the objections. Tesla won Belgium and Denmark approvals within 48 hours in early June, joining Lithuania and Estonia, all riding on the Dutch certification through mutual recognition rather than fresh national testing. That asymmetry, national clearances sprinting while the bloc-wide vote idles, is what the data dispute now threatens.

EVXL’s Take

Karremans gave the cleanest possible answer to a messy problem: the marketing was separate from the decision. That may even be true. The RDW has been consistent on this point since it cleared FSD on April 10, and it earned credibility back in November 2025 when it publicly slapped down Tesla’s premature approval claims and asked fans to stop calling its offices. A regulator that tells Tesla’s own supporters to back off is not a regulator rubber-stamping Tesla’s slides.

But the defense leans on numbers the RDW itself won’t confirm. The minister quoted 24 million miles. Tesla posted 15 million for the same window. When a government minister reaches for a manufacturer’s mileage figure to rebut a story about that manufacturer’s misleading figures, the irony writes itself. The stronger argument was always the 18 months of independent testing, not the post-launch mileage tally.

The EU-wide vote will not clear FSD before the end of 2026. The Reuters documents, the ETSC’s letter campaign, and Scandinavian skepticism over speeding and icy-road behavior give hesitant ministers every reason to wait, and Tuesday’s parliamentary session showed the political cost of moving fast has climbed.

Sources: Reuters (Toby Sterling), European Transport Safety Council.

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