Tesla may have gotten the balloons and streamers out a bit too early.
Launching its supervised full self-driving software, or FSD, across international borders has proved challenging for Tesla. While North American drivers have had access to FSD since 2022, the company has only released some features in China, its second-largest market.
Tesla owners in the EU appeared to be set to get some good news on that front, according to Tesla — but a Dutch regulator then chimed in to say not so fast.
On Saturday, Tesla posted on X that it had been pushing to roll out FSD in Europe for over a year. The “main path to success,” it said, was partnering with the Dutch approval authority RDW.
“Currently, RDW has committed to granting Netherlands National approval in February 2026,” Tesla wrote in its X post.
Two days later, RDW shot back its own “response to Tesla’s appeal.” In the blog post originally written in Dutch, the regulatory agency had drawn up a schedule for Tesla to meet requirements by February 2026, but that the approval wasn’t a done deal. Bloomberg was the first to report RDW’s response.
“RDW and Tesla know what efforts need to be made to make a decision on this in February,” the Dutch regulatory agency wrote, according to a Google translation. “Whether the schedule will be met remains to be seen in the coming period.”
As the chokepoint for European FSD expansion, Tesla employees have been impatient with RDW’s extensive testing and slowness. “Keep in mind that this is mission critical for our leadership,” a Tesla employee wrote in an email to the RDW last November, viewed by Business Insider. Musk has previously lamented the EU’s self-driving regulation, calling it a “layer cake of bureaucracy.”
Tesla has faced steep competition in the European market, as Chinese competitors like BYD race for market share. European Tesla sales were down an estimated 48.5% year over year in October, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
In Tesla’s X post, the company also called on its fans to push the regulatory agency.
“Please contact them via link below to express your excitement & thank them for making this happen as soon as possible,” Tesla wrote.
RDW didn’t appear to be a fan of the move, asking readers “not to contact us about this,” according to the translation of its response.
“It takes up unnecessary time for our customer service,” the translated post read. “Moreover, this will have no influence on whether or not the planning is met.”
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