Safety Group Gets It Backwards by Urging EU to Block Tesla FSD

The European Transport Safety Council urged EU member states on Tuesday to reject Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system over a speed offset feature that can let the car travel above the detected speed limit, but the ETSC is an advocacy group, not a regulator, and its non-binding recommendation runs against what the actual regulators keep deciding.

The real decision belongs to national regulators and the bloc’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, and Croatia became the eighth European country to clear FSD Supervised on the very same day the ETSC issued its statement. The Netherlands opened the door in April after an 18-month independent evaluation, and Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Slovenia and the Czech Republic have all followed. An EU-wide vote once expected in October is now unlikely before December, so Tesla keeps working country by country, and the country-by-country strategy keeps working.

The ETSC’s objection centers on a speed offset function that can raise the car’s maximum speed by up to 50 percent above the detected limit, for which it says Tesla never sought an exemption under United Nations vehicle rules. But a speed offset is ordinary cruise-control behavior, not a rogue feature. The driver sets it, the driver can change it, and the driver remains fully responsible for the vehicle at all times in Supervised mode. Treating a driver-controlled setting as though the car were deciding to break the law on its own misrepresents how the system works.

It is also worth asking what the ETSC is actually asking regulators to do. Sweden, France and the Czech Republic have raised questions about speed-limit compliance, yet the Czech Republic approved the system anyway this month after its own expert review. Tesla has opened its FSD safety data to public scrutiny, showing the system 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometres on European roads. Elon Musk has said delaying approval “will cost lives,” and every month of delay is a month of drivers going without a system the data says is safer than they are.

The ETSC is entitled to its opinion, and scrutiny of driver assistance systems is healthy. Opinions do not grant type approvals, though, and while the safety group lobbies against FSD from the sidelines, the regulators with actual authority, the test data and the legal responsibility keep reaching the opposite conclusion, one country at a time.