Slovakia Wants In on Tesla FSD, and It’s Moving Fast

Slovak Transport Minister Jozef Ráž announcing that Tesla FSD will soon be usable in Slovakia, from the video shared by @slovakevguy. Credit: @slovakevguy/X

Slovak Transport Minister Jozef Ráž says his ministry will send a letter recognizing the Netherlands’ Tesla FSD Supervised approval within days, a move that would make Slovakia the ninth European Union country to clear the driver-assistance system.

Ráž posted the update in a short video on Wednesday, filmed in front of a highway tunnel and later shared on X by Slovak EV advocate @slovakevguy. In the clip, the minister says his ministry has been talking with Tesla and is working so Slovak drivers can use the system too. On-screen text in the video and reporting from Slovak daily Pravda both point to the same next step: a recognition letter headed for the Dutch RDW, the authority that gave FSD Supervised its provisional European type approval in April.

On-screen text in Ráž’s video says that after the letter is delivered, FSD will be usable in Slovakia, and Pravda reports the same plan in its write-up of the clip. The minister also stressed that nothing about the approval hands the wheel over for good: drivers stay responsible and have to keep watching the road.

FSD Supervised is Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance software that can steer, brake, change lanes and handle city streets while a human keeps watching the road and stays ready to take over. It is not unsupervised autonomy, and the “Supervised” label is the whole point of the European approvals so far. The Netherlands opened that door on April 10 under Article 39 of EU Regulation 2018/858, and other member states can choose to recognize that provisional approval for their own roads rather than wait for a bloc-wide vote.

Eight EU countries have already cleared the system that way: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia, which became the eighth in late September. Slovakia would be ninth if the letter lands and Tesla flips the feature on. An EU-wide decision that once looked possible in October is now expected no earlier than December, which is why the country-by-country path has been moving faster than Brussels. Germany’s transport minister said this week he will push for a union-wide green light and is open to a German national path if that stalls.

Ráž’s announcement landed just ahead of Slovakia’s municipal elections, where he is also running for mayor of Bratislava, the capital. The ministry message that went with the video put the emphasis on safety, saying it is working so a modern system that raises safety can be used by Slovak drivers and that talks with Tesla are “on a good path.”

What still isn’t public is the exact day the recognition letter will leave Bratislava, when Tesla will actually unlock FSD Supervised for Slovak owners once that letter is delivered, or whether Slovakia ran any of its own road tests beyond reviewing the Dutch paperwork. Ráž also did not say which hardware and software versions will get the feature first, or how many Teslas in Slovakia are even eligible today.

If the letter goes out this week and Tesla follows the same pattern it used in Czechia and Croatia, Slovak owners could see FSD Supervised show up as an over-the-air update soon after the paperwork clears. The longer Brussels waits on a December vote, the more of Europe may already be driving it by then.