Tesla spent months pushing the Dutch vehicle authority RDW to scale back its review of Full Self-Driving (Supervised), including disputing a €365,000 bill, according to hundreds of pages of emails obtained by Reuters through public-records requests in seven European countries.
In November 2024, a Tesla staffer told RDW that starting vehicle tests by the end of that month was "mission critical for our leadership," and that leadership would "measure the goodwill" of the regulator by whether it hit that date. In April 2025, Tesla called RDW's €365,000 invoice for five months of work an "extremely high cost" and said it would hold payment until it received an hour-by-hour accounting of every employee assigned to the project. It also objected to paying for five RDW staffers to visit Tesla's Giga Berlin plant. A week later, an RDW staffer invited Tesla to suggest how the regulator "might adjust or reduce the required effort moving forward."
Other concessions followed, the documents suggest: RDW offered to monitor part of Tesla's tests remotely instead of sending an inspector to witness them; it told Tesla it did not want to "dive too deep in technical details" about over-the-air updates and did not question their quality; and it agreed to give Tesla advance notice of which tests would be run and the names of the safety drivers.
RDW approved FSD Supervised in April 2026 after more than 18 months of review, making the Netherlands the first EU country to authorise it. Eight member states now allow the system — the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia — but an EU-wide decision needs 15 of 27 states representing 65 percent of the population, and Germany, Italy and Spain have not signed on. Sweden wants the EU to reject FSD unless Tesla removes the ability to set speeds above the legal limit. A vote could come as early as December.
Seven traffic-safety researchers who reviewed Tesla's supporting study for Reuters found its FSD sample too small to support the company's claims about lives saved, and noted that the comparisons cannot be read as causal. Tesla did not publish the customer disengagement data that would settle the debate, and RDW says it will not release its own test results, citing Tesla trade secrets.
