EVwire brief: The Netherlands did not approve Tesla's FSD Supervised on the strength of the company's marketing on FSD safety stats. The Dutch regulator, the RDW, signed off only after more than 18 months of its own testing on its test track and on public roads, and concluded that, used as intended, the system makes a positive contribution to road safety.
That is worth restating this week, because a Reuters report has recast Tesla's European approval push around alleged "misleading" safety statistics the company showed regulators. The numbers Reuters scrutinizes are Tesla's self-published US marketing figures. They are not what the RDW based its decision on, and not even the exact version of the system Europe approved.
Reuters' report, which builds on an examination it ran last month, focuses on self-reported claims Tesla has promoted: that FSD is up to ten times safer than a human driver, travels seven times farther between crashes, and could have saved 32,000 lives.
Critics the agency spoke to argue that those comparisons are stacked, pointing to the lives-saved figure's assumption that every US vehicle is swapped for an FSD Tesla, and to Tesla measuring its airbag-deployment crashes against a broader, milder US crash rate.
None of that, though, is how FSD Supervised was cleared in the Netherlands. The RDW has said plainly that it does not base decisions on marketing claims or outside statistics, and that it runs its own tests, analyses, and verifications on public roads and test tracks.
The RDW actually issued a comment to Reuters, stressing that it “does not rely on marketing claims or external statistics" to make decisions and performs its own "tests, analyses and verifications" of FSD Supervised on public roads and test tracks.
The RDW did not stop at its extensive testing process. It concluded that FSD Supervised makes a positive contribution to road safety, and that because the system monitors the driver continuously and strictly, it is safer than other driver-assistance systems. That is the Dutch regulator's own assessment of the European system, not a Tesla FSD marketing slide.
It helps to be precise about what FSD Supervised is. For all its end-to-end capability, it remains a Level 2 driver-assistance system: the driver supervises throughout and stays legally responsible, while cabin sensors check that eyes are on the road and hands can retake the wheel within moments.
That puts it in the same legal class as hands-off highway systems Europe has already cleared, including BMW's motorway hands-off feature with automated lane changes and Ford's BlueCruise. These systems are, if any, more similar to Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot in capabilities than FSD Supervised’s point-to-point capabilities.
FSD Supervised was tested extensively in the Netherlands for 18 months before giving the system its approval
Singling out the most capable and most closely monitored Level 2 system as the uniquely dangerous one, while quieter, less capable systems draw no fire, gets the risk almost exactly backwards.
The real-world record points the same way. Tesla reports more than 11 billion cumulative miles (18 billion km) driven on FSD, and FSD Supervised crossed 15 million km (9 million miles) in Europe within 40 days of the Dutch approval.
In the Netherlands, its three logged collisions across 23 million km (14 million miles) all came in urban driving, with none on the highway, where the data showed roughly 3.5 times fewer crashes than human drivers.
Tesla is actively looking to secure regulatory approval for FSD Supervised in more than 30 countries
That European data is Tesla's own, and the urban cases come with little detail, so it is not the last word. But it is operational data from the actual EU system, the kind regulators can audit, rather than a US marketing extrapolation. And the RDW is not alone: Estonia, Lithuania, Denmark, and Belgium have since run their own approvals.
In this case, the unglamorous reading is the most accurate one. Critics can argue Tesla's marketing stats, but the system Europe approved was judged on 18 months of extensive, independent testing and came out rated a net gain for safety.
Casting that as a scandal, and a regulator-vetted, closely monitored system as a danger, doesn't make anyone safer. If anything, it pushes public opinion away from one of the most capable safety tools on the road.
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