The European Union has pushed back its vote on approving Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system for the bloc, with the earliest possible decision now expected in December, according to Electrek. The EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles had been expected to vote as soon as October 6, but the published agenda for that meeting shows only a “continuation of discussions,” not a vote.
The vote concerns a request from the Netherlands asking the EU to recognize its national approval of Tesla’s supervised self-driving software across all 27 member states, under a process known as Article 39 authorization. To pass, the request needs support from 15 of the EU’s 27 countries, representing at least 65% of the bloc’s population.
So far, seven countries — the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Czechia — have recognized the Dutch approval on their own, representing roughly 53 million people, or about 12% of the EU’s population, per Electrek’s reporting. Sweden has said it wants Tesla to remove the ability to drive above posted speed limits before it will back the request, and France has cited concerns about speeding and driver attention. Germany, Italy, and Spain haven’t recognized the approval either.
The delay follows separate reporting from Investing.com noting that regulators have also raised questions about how the system performs on icy roads and how attentive drivers stay while using it. Electrek separately reported that FSD sped in a majority of tested 30 km/h zones in Brussels, a data point regulators are weighing as part of the review.
More than 70,000 Tesla owners across five EU countries are already using FSD (Supervised) under existing national approvals, according to Electrek. The delay doesn’t change anything for FSD in the US, which operates under separate NHTSA rules — but it’s a sign that wider EU-wide approval is still months away, at best.
Photo by Paolo Rossa.