Germany’s federal transport minister says he’ll push for Tesla‘s FSD Supervised to get approved across the European Union, and he’s ready to look at a German national approval if Brussels doesn’t act.
At a Tagesspiegel Background conference in Berlin on Tuesday, transport minister Steffen Bilger said a European agreement on Tesla‘s driver-assistance system would make sense, but if that falls through, Germany will discuss “what can be done” on its own, according to heise.de‘s report. FSD Supervised is Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system that steers, brakes and changes lanes by itself while the driver stays responsible and keeps watching the road. It’s still waiting on a formal approval from European regulators.
Getting an EU-wide approval isn’t easy. It needs a qualified majority in the EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, which means 15 of the 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. The committee talked about FSD Supervised again at its October 6 meeting but didn’t hold a vote, so approval this month looks unlikely, and the report says a decision is now expected in December.
The Netherlands got things going when its RDW authority granted a provisional EU type approval for FSD Supervised on April 10, 2026, under Article 39(4) of Regulation (EU) 2018/858. Since then, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia and Czechia have adopted it, and together with the Netherlands that covers roughly 12 percent of the EU population, according to heise.de. The report says about 40,000 Teslas have driven roughly 24 million kilometers in the Netherlands without relevant incidents, and RDW spent more than a year and a half testing the system, logging over 3,000 hours and more than 1,000 of its own test runs.
In Germany, the KBA motor transport authority is going through the Dutch documents and wants to run a Tesla through its own tests, though there’s no deadline. If Brussels stalls, Bilger’s fallback is Article 39(5), which would let Germany approve FSD nationally. If the European Commission later rejected that, the approval would lapse six months afterward, but vehicles already built could keep their approval in the states that adopted it.
For now, the next shot at a qualified majority comes at the EU committee’s December meeting, and Bilger has made it clear Germany is prepared to look at going it alone if that vote doesn’t happen.
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