Tesla Hands France Two FSD Cars for UTAC Tests Ahead of EU Vote

French Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said on September 2 that Tesla has provided two Full Self-Driving Supervised cars for on-road testing in France after a constructive video call with Elon Musk, marking what he called a new phase ahead of a possible European Union vote on October 6, 2026.

In a post on X, Tabarot wrote that French authorities have worked closely with Tesla for several months on the technical adaptations that would let France support FSD Supervised homologation, which will be decided at the European level in the coming weeks. “Avec la mise à disposition de deux véhicules équipés de FSD par Tesla, nous entrons désormais dans une nouvelle étape : celle des essais sur route,” he said — with two FSD-equipped vehicles now available, France is entering the on-road testing stage.

According to Reuters, the meeting was initiated by Tesla, and a Transport Ministry source said France wants its own tests to verify data from the Netherlands and Tesla on French roads and urban layouts. Results are aimed for mid to late September so Paris can be ready to vote when the EU Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles meets on October 6, or at the group’s next sitting in early December.

Tesla France later told newsrooms the two cars are going to UTAC, France’s homologation body, for independent evaluation on French roads for the first time, and that they are series vehicles for the French market rather than prototypes. The company also said it has been testing FSD in France since 2024 with more than 200,000 kilometres logged, plus more than 5,000 customer ride-along demonstrations since December 2025 — so the new step is the independent UTAC programme, not the start of testing altogether.

In July, Tabarot had said safety trade-offs were not yet enough to authorize FSD Supervised “as it currently stands,” citing speed-limit behaviour and driver attention in cities. FSD Supervised is already live in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, and Lithuania, where Tesla says the fleet has logged more than 100 million supervised kilometres and is 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving. Hardware 4 owners in approved markets run FSD Supervised v14.3.7, while Hardware 3 cars use v14.1 Lite via software 2026.21.6.

Nothing in Tabarot’s post activates the software for French owners. Sweden’s government has separately restated its ambition for Union-wide FSD Supervised approval, and France’s July caution still sits on the record. The October committee still needs a qualified majority of at least 15 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population before the system can unlock across the bloc.