Tesla Submits Misleading FSD Safety Data to European Regulators
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Reuters reports exclusively that Tesla's FSD safety statistics submitted to Dutch and Swedish regulators contain multiple invalid comparisons, according to independent researchers — and the Netherlands has already approved FSD on this basis, meaning the foundation for EU-wide approval may be methodologically flawed from the start.
How exactly is Tesla's "10x safer" claim misleading?
Musk and other executives have spent the past year claiming FSD is 10 times safer than human drivers.
This means → the headline number sounds dramatic, but it rests on two comparisons that don't hold up.
First, Tesla counts only crashes that deploy airbags, while the U.S. national crash rate includes minor accidents — comparing severe-only against all-severity will always look better. Second, every Tesla on the road is a new car; the average U.S. vehicle is far older, and newer cars are inherently safer thanks to more advanced safety features.
In plain terms = FSD didn't make cars 10x safer — the statistical method made the number look 10x better.
The Netherlands already approved — did it trust this data?
The Dutch road authority RDW received Tesla's FSD application in late 2024 and granted approval in April this year.
RDW stated its decision was based on its own "testing, analysis and verification," not on marketing claims or external statistics.
But RDW did not say whether it independently evaluated the U.S. safety statistics Tesla provided.
This reflects a critical gap: saying "we didn't rely on your data" is not the same as proving "we checked your data" — and the distance between the two matters.
What did Tesla pitch to Sweden next?
Days after the Dutch approval, Tesla policy manager Ivan Komusanac emailed Swedish regulators on April 10 with a slide deck attached.
The deck claimed FSD-equipped Teslas travel more than 7x farther between crashes than the average U.S. human driver, and that FSD "could save 32,000 lives and prevent 1.9 million injuries."
In plain terms = those figures assume every vehicle in America — including freight trucks and motorcycles — is replaced by an FSD-equipped Tesla sedan, each at least 7x safer than the vehicle it replaces. Researchers called the assumption entirely unrealistic.
How are European regulators responding?
Swedish Transport Agency investigator Anders Eriksson declined to comment on Tesla's data but said Sweden will not rely solely on aggregated safety claims and will "look at the overall evidence."
European Transport Safety Council spokesperson Dudley Curtis was blunter: the council is "deeply concerned" that Tesla submitted "unreliable safety data" to Swedish regulators.
Tesla did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.
Where is the real risk here?
The Dutch RDW is now seeking EU-wide type approval on Tesla's behalf.
This means → if EU-level unified approval is built on the Dutch decision, and the Dutch process did not fully scrutinize the methodology behind Tesla's safety data, then the compliance foundation for FSD across all of Europe could be undermined.
In plain terms = one country approved, and the rest of Europe may follow — but if the first approval has a blind spot, every subsequent one inherits that same blind spot.
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