As Tesla teslarolled into the Netherlands late 2024 to start the approval process for its Full Self-Driving system, it was accompanied by the same set of claims. The same statistics that Elon Musk (Tesla) and other leaders have been pointing to in the United States made their way to the Netherlands and Sweden for the regulators, with Elon suggesting that FSD is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. But a closer look by independent traffic safety researchers suggests those numbers may be far less reliable than Tesla lets on.
The crux of the problem is a series of safety comparisons which Reuters studied last month that showed several invalid data comparisons in Tesla’s statistics. The company has been releasing its own vehicle safety ratings for years, but researchers say these aren’t designed to let people know how much safer FSD actually is. For instance, Tesla compares crash rates from FSD-equipped Teslas that deployed their airbags to a general U.S. crash rate for all cars, including a much lower number of crashes that are not as severe. The company also says that its vehicles are being compared to the average model that the American car is, which is much older than the average Tesla. That’s important, because newer cars are equipped with more state-of-the-art built-in safety equipment, which will naturally decrease crash frequency, regardless of whether FSD is activated.
Tesla in November 2024 wrote to the Dutch road regulator RDW offering a link to its safety report and stating that more FSD usage equals safer roads. The use of FSD was approved by RDW after a period of more than one year of testing and discussion, in April. The Dutch regulator is now seeking EU‑wide approval on Tesla’s behalf. RDW said it was a back-and-forth conversation with the speculators, and didn’t comment directly on Tesla’s safety numbers when asked about the Reuters list of problems. Rather, the agency explained in a statement that it doesn’t use marketing claims or outside data for its decisions, and that it tests, analyzes and verifies the system on public streets and test tracks. The agency did not reveal whether it analyzed Tesla’s U.S. safety data, but only that Tesla gathered a lot of data while testing and that RDW validated, tested and audited all that data.
Shortly after the Dutch ruling, a Tesla policy manager named Ivan Komusanac sent an e-mail to the Swedish regulators requesting the same ruling. A slide deck was attached that illustrated that Teslas with FSD can go over seven times further between accidents than the average U.S. human driver. The presentation also suggested that FSD may have been able to save 32,000 lives and prevent 1.9 million injuries. Those are very deceptive numbers to those who spoke with Reuters, the news agency. They are based on the unrealistic assumption that every vehicle in the United States—including freight trucks and crash‑prone motorcycles—would be replaced by an FSD‑enabled Tesla, and that every Tesla would be at least seven times safer than the vehicle it replaces.
But Anders Eriksson, an investigator with the Swedish Transport Agency, said he wouldn’t comment in detail on the data Tesla supplied. He also added that the Swedish pricing watchdog “is not taking the head count as a basis for evaluating such a system, but the overall evidence presented.” The regulator did not answer Reuters’ questions about what other evidence Tesla submitted.
The European Transport Safety Council, a watchdog group, is “certainly concerned” that Tesla gave unsafe data to regulators in Sweden, according to a statement by a representative of the group, Dudley Curtis. If Tesla plans to make a claim about safety, they should “put the data up for grabs, let any qualified researcher look at it, and then talk about it,” Curtis added.
Tesla has confirmed that getting FSD approval in Europe is essential for the company’s sales in the region. The company has not yet caught up with the market share it lost last year due to criticisms of its political activities, such as associating with far right political parties in Europe. Without the approval, it may be more difficult for Tesla to compete in an area where Chinese EV manufacturers are aggressively making a claim.
Fifty-five percent of EU member states (sixty-five percent of EU’s population) will have to vote yes for FSD to be legalized across the EU in the coming months. A single member-state may authorize the technology on its own until the technology is approved by the ISAF. A regulator in Greece, which said last month that the country aims to approve FSD, cited data from the other side of the Atlantic that showed this system ultimately leads to a very significant drop in accidents. The Greek transport ministry refused to comment on whether the information it quoted was from Tesla’s safety report.
In other European countries, regulators have received emails from drivers praising Tesla’s safety statistics and asking for a quick approval, meanwhile. Several Tesla motorists have written to the Norwegian road authority last autumn in reference to the car safety report made by the company. One claimed that the technology is far safer than the average human-driven vehicle, and could help to cut traffic accidents by as much as ninety percent and save lives on Norwegian roads. To some Tesla fans, Stein‑Helge Mundal from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has addressed, stating that the figures put together by Tesla are “self-produced” and thus one could struggle to find a correlation with the authorities’ figures on accidents.
