‘This is mission critical’: Inside Tesla’s battle to get Full Self-Driving approved in Europe

For nearly a year, Tesla has been teasing a European rollout of Full Self-Driving, its driver-assist software. It has posted videos of its cars navigating narrow Roman streets, busy German boulevards, and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe — all while touting an ambitious timeline for the product.

To get there, the automaker has had to contend with what CEO Elon Musk has called a “layer cake of bureaucracy.” As Tesla has pushed for approval of a system it says is four times safer than human drivers, European regulators have moved slowly, requiring a level of testing and oversight far beyond that of their US counterparts.

Internal Dutch regulatory records reviewed by Business Insider show Tesla has taken a carrot-and-stick approach in its efforts to expand its Full Self-Driving system in Europe. Dutch officials, who hold the keys to EU-wide authorization, have moved more cautiously.

The mismatch underscores challenges that Tesla faces in its push to deploy self-driving technology as it confronts slowing sales — as well as a less enthusiastic European public and stricter regulatory environment.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. The Netherlands Vehicle Authority, known as the RDW, said that it couldn’t answer questions by Business Insider’s deadline because staffers were on vacation.

The Dutch chokepoint

Tesla employees have expressed impatience with the extensive testing the RDW has required and the slow pace of its processes.

“Keep in mind that this is mission critical for our leadership,” a Tesla employee wrote in an email to the RDW last November, urging the agency to approve Tesla’s testing permit by the end of the month.

Tesla’s dealings with the RDW are key to the company’s self-driving efforts across Europe. The company has asked the agency to help it get its Full Self Driving system approved across the EU, the records show. (Despite its name, Full Self Driving requires a licensed operator behind the steering wheel, paying attention and ready to take the wheel, at all times.)

The RDW documents cover a period from September 2024 to January 2025, and show that Tesla met weekly with regulators beginning in October. As of December, regulators had approved nine vehicles for testing in the country.

Starting last year, Tesla also sought permission to test vehicles equipped with FSD software in Denmark and Norway, according to records shared with Business Insider by Kees Roelandschap, a Tesla fan in the Netherlands who has closely followed its regulatory moves in Europe.

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration declined to comment. A representative for the Danish Road Traffic Authority confirmed Tesla received permission to test FSD this spring and “regularly informs us about the process.”

While Tesla’s vehicles are allowed on European roads, their self-driving capabilities are much more limited than in the US. Maneuvers such as highway lane changes require driver approval, and the vehicles generally cannot navigate intersections on their own.

“It’s very restrictive here, and it’s due to the regulations,” said Roelandschap. “Roundabouts, forget it. It will brake for traffic lights, but it will also brake for those lights in front of a railroad crossing.”

The tension between Tesla and the RDW comes at a crucial juncture for the car company. Musk said in July that the carmaker hoped FSD would help buoy sales.

The company’s stock price is down about 18% year-to-date, and it has cut prices in response to more competition and slumping demand in some markets. In Europe, Tesla sales through the first four months of 2025 were only about half of what they were in the first four months of 2024, with Chinese competitors like BYD making gains, according to Jato Dynamics.

Tesla’s campaign for approval

The number of vehicles Tesla delivered globally grew nearly tenfold from 2017 to 2022, helped along by sales growth in Europe, which accounted for about a fifth of its deliveries in 2023. The company has had a presence in Europe since it opened a hub in the Netherlands in 2013.

In its quest to have FSD approved, Tesla has at times pursued a charm offensive, the documents show.

Tesla made plans for Musk to meet with RDW staff when they visited Tesla facilities in California, and the company shelled out around $30,000 to bring a group of RDW staff to its engineering headquarters in Palo Alto in November 2024.

It held an FSD “Experience Day” in the parking lot of the RDW’s headquarters in Zoetermeer, welcoming regulatory staff to get behind the wheel of its automated cars. Musk personally spoke with the RDW’s two managers in January; afterward, a Tesla employee wrote in an email that they made “good points,” and Musk “gets it now better.”

In emails, Tesla employees appeared frustrated with the permits the company has been asked to obtain, the tests it has been required to conduct, and scheduling and communications issues with RDW employees.

They said an accelerated testing timeline was crucial to its success and asked the agency to “be more reasonable in their requests,” claiming a testing snafu cost “valuable time.” They also argued that European drivers were missing out on new technology.

“The system we are applying for in this letter has been made available to customers in North America since 2018 and is constantly updated to improve its safety and its capabilities ever since,” Tesla wrote in a November 2024 letter.

Tesla released its FSD software in the US to a limited group of drivers in 2020 and to paying customers across North America in 2022. The carmaker estimates that more than a billion miles have been driven using FSD. In the US, the software can recognize stop lights, change lanes, and execute turns, though it has been faulted for sometimes ignoring traffic laws.

Still, the RDW has proceeded cautiously. In November 2024, when Tesla said initiating FSD testing in the Netherlands that month was “mission critical,” regulators said that they were working on a plan for the project.

Tesla did not receive approval to begin testing until more than a month later.

Musk said during Tesla’s earnings call in January that the company aimed for the RDW to present Tesla’s technology to the EU in May 2025.

The RDW appears to still be deliberating. In March, the Netherlands told members of a European Commission technical advisory group that an unnamed manufacturer would soon submit an application to the group for approval of a self-driving technology. As of June, the group’s minutes indicated that the RDW “is still assessing the feasibility of the application.”

John Creamer, an auto-industry consultant, said in an email that European regulations on driver-control assistance systems haven’t kept pace with technology used by the likes of Tesla. Such regulations probably won’t be implemented until late 2026 or 2027, he said.

Unlike the US, where multiple companies, including Waymo and Zoox, have released autonomous vehicles in select cities, no AVs have been released in the Netherlands to date. Multiple AV companies are testing in Germany.

In an internal memo from October, agency staff proposed closely coordinating with its parent ministry, and, once Tesla finishes gathering testing data, making a “joint Go/NoGo decision” as to whether to allow Tesla to roll out FSD across the country. The parent ministry said it would not be involved in that decision and that the RDW memo overstated its role.

In the past, the RDW has been criticized for moving too quickly in Tesla’s favor. Earlier this year, an RDW whistleblower accused the agency of allowing Tesla to abuse a regulatory loophole in 2015 to deploy its Autopilot software, an advanced driver assistance system used on highways. The regulator told Dutch broadcaster BNNVARA that it stood by its decision.

A clash of systems

Europe’s automotive industry has historically been much more regulated than its US counterpart. While American automakers can self-certify that they have complied with federal safety standards, a car cannot be sold in Europe unless and until it has been “type approved” by regulators or their testing partners.

Approval for self-driving cars has hewed closely to this precedent.

The US has become the “Wild West” for autonomous vehicles, Missy Cummings, a former safety advisor for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, previously told Business Insider.

“There is very little regulation around training or informing the public about testing,” she said in October 2024.

Texas is in the process of launching new AV regulations, but until recently, the state operated on an honor code. To launch a version of its Robotaxi service in Texas earlier this summer, Tesla was only required to provide proof of insurance. In California, where the company has been testing since 2014, it’s required to submit information about incidents where operators take over from the software, and it must pass several milestones before it can begin operating on public roads.

By contrast, Europe’s type-approval regulations require testing by a government or independent technical service, and sometimes factory inspections, before a car or automobile component is allowed on the market. Creamer, the automotive regulatory consultant, said the RDW is widely respected and is among a small group of European regulators that are seen as highly engaged on autonomous driving issues.

Before starting testing this past fall, Tesla had to have its vehicles’ cybersecurity and software update management practices audited. Tesla also had to conduct an electromagnetic interference test in California that an RDW inspector witnessed via videoconference.

Over-the-air software updates also posed an issue for the handful of test vehicles that the RDW has authorized. In a December 2024 email, an RDW employee told Tesla that its vehicles couldn’t leave a parking lot until the latest version of its software was approved. It’s not clear from the emails how long that took.

In the US, by contrast, Tesla regularly releases new software updates without the piecemeal approval of regulators. It regularly tests out multiple different prototype versions of its AV software in a week, Business Insider previously reported.

In January, Tesla sought permission to conduct an over-the-air software update for a vehicle that was involved in an unspecified “incident,” according to the documents. It’s unclear what the incident entailed.

In the meantime, Musk continues to vent his frustration on X.

“Tesla is waiting for EU approval (sigh),” he wrote in May.

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