France has started actual on-road testing of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and the country’s own transport ministry says the early results haven’t turned up anything disqualifying.
What France found
France’s Transport Ministry says its initial road tests of Tesla FSD found “no major obstacles” to adapting the system to European regulations, and the ministry describes its collaboration with Tesla throughout testing as close. Elon Musk met with French Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot on September 2 to push the approval process along, a meeting French officials called constructive.
Why this is still a national test, not an approval
France has consistently said it would rather wait for a single, harmonized European Union decision than grant its own national approval that Brussels could later override. That EU-wide call sits with the EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, which held discussion-only sessions on FSD as recently as June 2026; the next real opportunity for a formal vote is expected in October 2026, though it could slip into 2027. Five countries — the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, and Belgium — have already approved FSD Supervised through the Netherlands’ original April 2026 clearance and mutual recognition since.
What this means if you’re not in Europe
None of this changes what FSD Supervised can do in a US-market Tesla today — this is entirely about clearing a separate regulatory bar for European roads. But it’s a reasonable signal of how Tesla’s own regulators, not just Tesla, are currently assessing the system’s real-world behavior.
Ryan Shaw covered this story on his channel on September 9, 2026:
The video is one creator’s take on the news; the regulatory facts above come from Tesla’s home-market reporting and France’s own transport ministry, not the video itself.
