A Brussels road-safety nonprofit clocked Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software breaking posted 30 km/h speed limits in 55% of the zones it tested, averaging 44 km/h in streets meant to cap traffic at half that speed. The group, Johanna.be, spent three days in July driving roughly 400 kilometers around the Belgian capital with FSD engaged, timing the results to land just ahead of a European Union committee vote on whether to let the software operate across all 27 member states. That vote, once expected within days, has since slipped to December.
Forty-four kilometers an hour in a thirty zone
Johanna.be’s testers found FSD speeding in more than half of the 30 km/h zones they drove through, and in 42% of the woonerven, the shared residential streets where Belgian law caps speeds at 20 km/h. In many of those zones, the group says, Tesla’s own dashboard display compounded the problem: the car correctly detected a posted 30 km/h sign but then showed drivers a 50 km/h limit anyway, an error one Johanna.be representative described as being “akin to a passenger constantly reassuring the driver that the speed limit is 50 km/h in nearly every 30-zone through which they pass.”
The stakes behind that gap are not abstract. A pedestrian struck at 44 km/h is nearly six times more likely to die than one struck at 30 km/h, a relationship Johanna.be cited directly in its published findings. Separately, the group’s dashcam footage documented FSD attempting to overtake cyclists on streets where doing so is prohibited, a maneuver the software carried out more than once during the test period.
Johanna.be sent its findings to two regulators, not one
Johanna.be forwarded its results on September 7 to both the Dutch vehicle authority that first approved FSD in Europe and the Flemish regional mobility ministry, giving regulators nearly a month’s notice before the EU committee was due to weigh in. A spokesperson for that Flemish ministry, Xavier Lesenne, characterized FSD instead as “a learning system that continuously processes new and additional information,” adding that under Belgian and EU rules the driver “remains 100% responsible” for the vehicle regardless of what the software does.
That framing sits at the center of the regulatory fight. The Dutch authority, RDW, granted FSD Supervised a provisional national type approval after testing the system for more than 18 months, and its own account of the process draws a hard line: “A vehicle with FSD Supervised is not self-driving. It is a driver controlled assistance system,” the agency has said, adding that “the driver is supported and remains responsible.” RDW’s approval is the one now up for an EU-wide extension, a three-step process the agency describes as its own application to the European Commission, followed by a vote among all member states in the responsible technical committee. Getting from a single country’s sign-off to a bloc-wide green light, in other words, was always going to run through exactly the kind of independent road test Johanna.be just published.
A vote that was supposed to happen next month
The EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles had been expected to take up that vote on October 6, needing at least 15 countries representing 65% of the bloc’s population to approve extending Dutch approval bloc-wide. Only seven of 27 member states currently recognize FSD, and France’s transport minister has already rejected the Dutch approval outright, citing speeding and driver-attention concerns similar to what Johanna.be documented. Sweden, Norway and Finland have separately raised their own objections.
The committee’s draft October 6 agenda now shows only a “continuation of discussions,” with no vote scheduled until the panel reconvenes in December at the earliest. Johanna.be’s test results, gathered in a country that had already approved the software, are among the evidence opponents are expected to cite when that vote finally comes. Belgium’s own approval, in other words, produced the data now being used to argue against extending it further.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment on the Johanna.be findings, according to reporting on the test. Until the committee votes, FSD Supervised remains legally available only where individual national regulators such as RDW have separately approved it, leaving Brussels drivers who bought the feature waiting on a European process that just gained two more months. For a system Tesla has marketed as ready for wide rollout, a delay measured in a single committee agenda item is a modest setback; for the pedestrians and cyclists Johanna.be’s cameras caught it passing too fast or too close, it is the difference between a rule that gets fixed before Christmas and one that does not.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
- Supplements now rank as the fifth-leading cause of death from liver disease.
- Herbal supplements are landing Americans in the hospital with liver damage, doctors warn
- General Motors is switching on cameras that record inside your vehicle by update
- A geomagnetic storm is forecast to hit Earth today, pushing the northern lights unusually far south
