Tesla Pressured Dutch Regulator to Ease FSD Review, Emails Reveal
Emails obtained by Reuters show Tesla disputed a €365,000 bill and pushed for reduced testing efforts during the approval process.
Tesla spent months pushing the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW to scale back its review of "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," according to emails obtained by Reuters. The correspondence reveals disputes over testing protocols and a €365,000 invoice, occurring as the company sought regulatory approval critical for its European expansion.
What Happened
Reuters’ investigation, based on hundreds of pages of correspondence obtained through public-records requests, indicates that Tesla leveraged both financial and procedural pressure against the RDW. In April 2025, Tesla labeled the regulator’s €365,000 invoice for five months of work an "extremely high cost" and withheld payment pending an hour-by-hour accounting. A week after this complaint, an RDW staffer invited Tesla to suggest how the regulator might "adjust or reduce the required effort moving forward."
The documents also show Tesla successfully argued that its own test reports should suffice instead of requiring an RDW inspector to witness tests, leading RDW to offer remote monitoring for parts of the process. Additionally, Tesla objected to paying for five RDW staffers to visit Giga Berlin and demanded advance notice of specific tests and safety driver names, which RDW agreed to provide. Earlier, in November 2024, a Tesla staffer told RDW that starting vehicle tests by the end of that month was "mission critical for our leadership," with leadership promising to "measure the goodwill" of the regulator based on hitting that date.
Why It Matters
The Dutch approval serves as the foundation for Tesla’s broader push to deploy FSD across Europe, where eight countries have already allowed the system and a bloc-wide vote is expected as early as December. However, the independence of this review is now under scrutiny. RDW stated that its engagement "does not compromise the independence or thoroughness" of its assessment, but it has not published its own FSD test data, citing Tesla trade secrets.
Tesla’s advocacy relies heavily on safety claims that experts contest. Seven traffic-safety researchers reviewed by Reuters found that Tesla’s "evidence dashboard" used a sample size too small to support causal estimates of crash prevention, relying instead on "surrogates" like hard braking and honking measured by Tesla’s professional test drivers. Despite this, Tesla and Elon Musk have publicly linked regulatory delays to road deaths, a narrative that mobilized Tesla owners to flood regulators in Sweden, Norway, and France with emails and social media posts.
The Bottom Line
While France has recently signaled a shift toward supporting FSD approval after high-level discussions with Musk, major markets like Germany, Italy, and Spain have not yet signed on. With the EU vote pending, the central question remains whether these nations will demand the release of independent test data or follow the path of countries that accepted the RDW’s review despite the documented pressure tactics.
