The Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV) listed only a 25‑minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request for its 119th meeting, meaning no vote will occur on the previously anticipated October 6 date. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest opportunity for a bloc‑wide vote on permitting Tesla’s supervised self‑driving system.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU‑wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10 under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858. That approval is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. To date, seven EU countries – the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia and Czechia – have cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads, covering about 53 million people, or roughly 12 % of the EU population. An EU‑wide authorization requires a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 % of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people. Germany, France, Italy and Spain remain the decisive markets; France has already rejected the current system, while several other governments have flagged speed‑limit compliance as the main sticking point.
Tesla’s safety case, presented to those governments, states that FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometres a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometres on EU public roads. An earlier mid‑year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometres in five approved countries, showed a collision advantage of 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometres. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. The figures are company‑reported and have not been independently audited.
The public‑health backdrop shows European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. Until the TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: the system is available in cities such as Prague and Amsterdam but locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap. Experts have questioned the methodology behind Tesla’s safety comparisons, and the Dutch RDW has declined to release underlying data citing commercial sensitivity. Tesla shares fell despite the announcement, while Wall Street analysts maintain a Moderate Buy consensus rating on the stock, with an average price target of $385.05 per share, implying roughly 5 % upside from current levels.
