Months of emails between Tesla and the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW show the carmaker pressing the agency to shrink its review of Full Self-Driving (Supervised), according to a Reuters investigation published Oct. 7, 2026. Among the items the news agency obtained: a Tesla dispute over a 365,000-euro invoice, and a request that RDW rely on Tesla’s own test reports instead of sending an inspector.
RDW went on to approve the system, and eight EU countries now allow it. The correspondence, drawn from public-records requests in seven European countries, now sits at the center of a fight over whether the rest of the bloc follows the Dutch lead, with a possible vote as soon as December.
The RDW emails Reuters obtained
Reuters based its investigation on hundreds of pages of correspondence, as summarized by Electrek. In November 2024, a Tesla staffer told RDW that starting vehicle tests by the end of that month was “mission critical” for Tesla’s leadership, and that leadership would judge the regulator’s goodwill by whether it met the date.
In April 2025, Tesla called RDW’s 365,000-euro invoice for five months of work an “extremely high cost,” and said it would hold payment until it received an hour-by-hour accounting of each RDW employee’s time. It also objected to paying for five RDW staff to visit Giga Berlin. About a week later, an RDW staffer invited Tesla to suggest how the regulator “might adjust or reduce the required effort moving forward.” RDW told Reuters that its engagement with manufacturers does not compromise its assessment. The emails are heavily redacted, and the agency has declined to publish its own test data.
Concessions on testing and secrecy
Several exchanges documented RDW giving ground on process. Tesla argued that its own test reports should suffice in place of an RDW inspector traveling to witness tests, and RDW offered to monitor part of them remotely. Tesla also demanded advance notice of the specific tests RDW would run and the names of the safety drivers, and RDW agreed while stressing its shared goals with the company.
A separate Reuters report from Aug. 6, republished by StreetInsider, found that Tesla had pressed RDW since late 2024 to keep its safety-review documentation confidential. In April 2025, a Tesla representative sought to confirm RDW would “never” release a particular document. RDW replied that “manufacturers always have the option to request an exemption from disclosing certain information.”
RDW cites an “obligation to protect manufacturer-specific information” in refusing to release its evaluation. Oliver Carsten, a transportation-safety professor at the University of Leeds, told Reuters that he saw no reason the testing details could not be public, given the broad public interest in them.
RDW approval and the EU committee vote
On April 10, 2026, RDW approved version 2026.3.6 of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) under UN Regulation 171, the rule covering Level 2 driver control assistance, according to The Next Web. RDW stated: “A vehicle with FSD Supervised is not self-driving. It is a driver assistance system.” The approval followed 18 months of testing, which Automotive World also reported, and RDW has not published the underlying research.
Reuters’ latest count, relayed by Electrek, is eight EU countries that allow the system: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia. Denmark’s road authority, Færdselsstyrelsen, provisionally accepted the Dutch approval on June 9, with a lapse after six months if the European Commission does not approve the system permanently. Germany, Italy and Spain have not signed on, and Sweden wants the EU to reject the system unless Tesla removes the ability to set speeds above the limit. France refused in July; its transport minister, Philippe Tabarot, later described a September video call with Elon Musk as a “constructive exchange.” An EU-wide decision requires a vote of the Commission’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, with support from member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population. The committee did not vote Oct. 6 as Tesla had indicated, and Reuters reports a vote could come as early as December.
Safety claims and owner lobbying
Tesla gave EU states an “evidence dashboard” in April and later posted a European study on X as a key basis for the Dutch approval. Seven traffic-safety researchers who reviewed the study for Reuters said the FSD sample was too small to compare with Tesla’s manual driving in Europe, and that Tesla measured proxies such as honking and hard braking rather than crashes. Marco Benedetti, a former NHTSA statistician now at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, said “lives saved” claims are where the analysis becomes nonsensical. Owners were also enlisted. Musk said at last year’s shareholder meeting that pressure from European customers on regulators “would be appreciated,” and a Tesla account on X later linked owners to RDW’s contact form. Norway’s regulator, Stein-Helge Mundal, told Reuters that Norway does not approve systems because they are popular and does not reject them because they are controversial. Electrek, which reported the story the following day, stressed that the correspondence does not prove FSD is unsafe in Europe. What it documents is a regulator that adjusted its process at a manufacturer’s request, while the data behind its approval stays unpublished until the Technical Committee casts its vote.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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