Tesla has submitted safety data to European regulators introducing 'fully autonomous driving'

In its effort to win European approval for its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system, Tesla submitted its own published safety statistics to regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands, which independent traffic safety researchers said were misleading marketing. A Reuters investigation published last month found that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other leaders have increasingly cited statistics over the past year that show FSD’s driver-assistance feature is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. But the news agency’s review found several invalid data comparisons underlying Tesla’s statistics that exaggerate its safety claims.

Tesla has submitted inflated safety data to some European regulators, according to correspondence obtained by Reuters through public records requests, as the electric car maker seeks broader approval of FSD in the region, where it is trying to regain market share. Tesla approached the RDW, the Dutch road regulator, in late 2024 to start the FSD approval process. In a November 2024 letter to RDW, Tesla provided a link to its safety report and claimed that “increased use” of FSD “leads to safer roads.” Tesla charges a monthly subscription for the FSD, which can drive itself under certain circumstances but requires a human driver to pay attention.

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After more than a year of testing and discussions with Tesla, RDW approved the FSD for use in the Netherlands in April. The Dutch regulator is now seeking EU-wide approval on Tesla’s behalf.

RDW declined to comment on the problems Reuters identified with Tesla’s safety statistics, but the agency said in a statement that it “does not rely on marketing claims or external statistics” to make decisions and conducts its own “tests, analysis and verification” of the system on public roads and test tracks. The agency did not say whether it had reviewed Tesla’s U.S. safety records.

RDW said Tesla “gathered a lot of data” during testing and the agency “verified, tested and verified all of that data.” RDW did not say what kind of data Tesla was collecting or what it was measuring.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

Save 32,000 lives?

Soon after the Dutch announced the decision on April 10, Tesla policy manager Ivan Komusanac wrote an email to Swedish regulators asking for similar approval of FSD. He attached a slide show showing the exaggerated claim that a Tesla using FSD can travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average American driver.

The presentation also claimed that FSD could have potentially saved 32,000 lives and prevented 1.9 million injuries.

Researchers interviewed by Reuters said the numbers are highly misleading because they are based on the unrealistic assumption that every American vehicle, including crash-prone trucks and motorcycles, will be replaced by an FSD-enabled Tesla — and that each Tesla car is actually at least seven times safer than the one it replaces.

A Reuters investigation also found that Tesla is exaggerating the safety of the technology by comparing the rate of accidents in FSD-piloted Teslas that trigger airbag deployments to the U.S. accident rate for all vehicles, which includes far less serious accidents. The company also compares its cars to the average American vehicle — which is much older than the average Tesla. This skews the results as automakers gradually introduce new safety features that reduce the number of accidents.

Anders Eriksson, an investigator at the Swedish Transport Agency, declined to comment on the data provided by Tesla, but added that Swedish regulators are “looking beyond just the headline numbers” and that any assessment of such a system would not be based “only on summary safety claims, but on the overall evidence presented.”

The regulator did not respond to questions from Reuters about what other evidence Tesla provided.

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Dudley Curtis, a spokesman for watchdog group the European Transport Safety Council, said his organization was “certainly concerned” that Tesla submitted “unreliable safety data” from the United States to regulators in Sweden after Reuters told the group about the correspondence.

He added that if Tesla wants to make a safety statement, it should “give the data to the university, have it independently verified by a qualified researcher, and then talk.”

TESLA expects a European rebound from FSD

Tesla said the approval of FSD in Europe is key to growing vehicle sales in the region. The electric car maker is still trying to regain market share after sales slumped last year amid protests against Musk’s political activities, including his embrace of far-right European political parties.

Failure to win approval could make it harder for Tesla to compete in a region where Chinese electric car makers are steadily making inroads.

In the coming months, representatives of 55% of member states, which make up 65% of the bloc’s population, must vote “yes” to make FSD legal across the EU.

In the meantime, individual member states can approve the technology themselves. The regulator in Greece, which said last month that the country intends to approve FSD, cited data “from across the Atlantic” which showed that “this system ultimately leads to a very significant reduction in accidents”.

Greece’s transport ministry declined to answer questions about whether the data it cited came from Tesla’s safety report.

Regulators in other European countries have been inundated with drivers citing Tesla’s safety record and urging swift approval of the FSD, the emails showed.

Several Tesla drivers have written to Norwegian road regulators, referring to Tesla’s vehicle safety report from last fall. One claimed that the technology was “significantly safer than average manual driving” with the potential to “reduce traffic accidents by up to 90% and thus save lives on Norwegian roads”.

Stein-Helge Mundal of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration responded to several Tesla enthusiasts, saying that Tesla’s numbers “are self-produced” so it is “difficult to find a correlation with the authorities’ accident statistics.” (Reporting by Chris Kirkham in Los Angeles and Marie Mannes in Stockholm; Additional reporting by Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing by Mike Colias and Anna Driver)