Dutch regulator keeps Tesla FSD safety review secret ahead of EU vote

Tesla’s push to expand Full Self-Driving across Europe is facing sharper scrutiny after Reuters published previously unreported emails showing the company made document secrecy a condition of cooperating with the Dutch review that led to the first EU approval of the system. The Netherlands approved FSD on April 10, 2026, and Dutch road regulator RDW has since backed wider European adoption while refusing to disclose the testing methodology or findings, citing trade-secret protections. The newly disclosed correspondence indicates that the confidentiality was not incidental. In an April 2025 exchange, a Tesla representative asked RDW to confirm a specific document would "never" be released and to explain how it would be "withheld from public disclosure," saying the company could not provide more information until that issue was resolved. RDW told Reuters it makes its own decisions on trade secrets rather than withholding material at Tesla’s request, though Reuters said the agency’s justification echoed Tesla’s language closely. The timing matters because a Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles vote expected on October 6, 2026, could make the Dutch approval effective across all 27 EU member states. Tesla sought approval under Article 39 of EU Regulation 2018/858, a mechanism for novel technologies that allows one national authority to grant a provisional approval that other member states can recognize without repeating the same testing. Safety critics say that structure becomes more problematic when the supporting evidence for a neural-network-based driver-assistance system is sealed from public view. Reuters also reported that Norway’s Public Roads Administration, after reviewing data shared by RDW, told Tesla owners that the material showed the vehicles were less safe than Tesla’s public statistics suggested. Independent researchers have previously challenged Tesla’s safety claims by arguing the company compares airbag-deployment crashes in its own fleet against a broader U.S. crash dataset that includes all tow-away crashes; when adjusted to a consistent severity threshold, the claimed gap narrowed to about 1.1 times the average driver rather than more than seven times. Neither Tesla nor RDW has publicly addressed Norway’s finding. The debate is unfolding as Tesla faces active U.S. scrutiny. Reuters said Tesla reported a record 207 crashes involving Autopilot and FSD to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in May 2026, and that NHTSA has three active probes into the systems, including Engineering Analysis EA26002 covering about 3.2 million vehicles and a preliminary evaluation covering about 2.88 million vehicles tied to more than 80 incidents involving red lights or opposing lanes. France has said it would not approve FSD in its current form, Sweden has urged the EU to vote against bloc-wide approval, and the European Transport Safety Council has called for a pause before the October vote.