EVwire brief: The RDW, the Netherlands' vehicle authority, has published a step-by-step account of how it approved Tesla's FSD Supervised, a day after the country's infrastructure minister was called to explain the decision to the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) on June 16.
The RDW stated that it checked how Tesla gathered and analyzed its figures, testing whether they were complete, verifiable and accurate, and had its own data experts independently re-run Tesla's statistical analysis.
For a baseline, it set recent Tesla models without FSD Supervised, which already meet European safety rules, against test cars running the system on European roads.
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The regulator stresses it did not lean on Tesla's numbers alone. It logged more than 3,000 hours of its own testing, on closed tracks and public roads, through complex urban traffic, a wide mix of road types, and extreme weather, drawing on data from 1.8 million km (1.12 million miles) driven in Europe with the system.
After more than 1,000 test runs conducted to European regulations, it concluded that FSD Supervised meets the applicable requirements and granted a European type approval valid for use in the Netherlands.
On safety, the RDW notes the system takes over multiple driving tasks once active but keeps continuous, strict watch on the driver. This became evident as the RDW assessed and tested the system over more than 18 months.
The RDW’s comments are straight: FSD Supervised was tested and vetted extremely
“Owing to the continuous and strict monitoring of the driver in the vehicle, this driver assistance system is at least as safe as other driver assistance systems.”
Approval did not end the scrutiny. The RDW says it keeps monitoring cars equipped with FSD Supervised and has, for now, raised the manufacturer's mandatory reporting from once a year to once a month, with room to open further investigations or order changes if the data warrants.
It reports that nearly 40,000 Teslas have since covered roughly 24 million km (about 15 million miles) in the Netherlands with no relevant incidents.
The RDW frames the sign-off as one of about 50,000 type approvals it issues each year, and cautions it cannot disclose everything, since manufacturers hand over commercially sensitive information during the process.
40,000 Teslas have since covered roughly 15 million miles in the Netherlands on FSD Supervised with no relevant incidents
Context:
The timing is no accident. The explanation follows the minister's appearance in parliament and lands amid renewed scrutiny of how safe FSD Supervised really is.
We argued previously that branding Tesla's Dutch data "misleading" did not hold up, and the regulator's own monitoring points the same way.
Tesla itself recently reported three collisions across 7 million km of non-highway driving in the country.
So much for the notion that a regulator simply took Tesla's word for it.
Source: RDW
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