Dutch OK for Tesla FSD

Tesla spent about 18 months running tests with the Dutch vehicle authority before it got this approval on April 10, 2026, and the Netherlands is now the first country in Europe to sign off on Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving Supervised” system for public roads. (rdw.nl) The key word is “Supervised.” The Dutch regulator says this is a driver assistance system, which means the human in the seat stays legally responsible the whole time, the same way a flight instructor still expects the student pilot to be ready on the controls. (rdw.nl) The regulator also says the car can handle many driving tasks while cameras and sensors check whether the driver’s eyes are on the road and whether their hands are available to grab the wheel immediately. If the driver keeps failing those checks, the system can be blocked from turning back on for a while. (rdw.nl) This was not a paperwork-only review. The Dutch authority said it examined the system on a test track and on public roads for more than one and a half years, and in March it was still telling reporters that Tesla and RDW were only in the final phase of the assessment. (rdw.nl) The approval is narrow in one important way: it is provisionally valid in the Netherlands first. Bloomberg reports RDW plans to submit the case to the European Commission for a wider European Union decision, which would require all member states to vote. (bloomberg.com) That means Dutch approval is not the same thing as instant approval in Germany, France, Italy, or the other 24 European Union countries. Electrek reports other member states can choose to recognize the Dutch approval nationally, but that recognition is not automatic. (electrek.co) There is another catch inside the approval itself. RDW says the version approved for Europe is not the same as the one Tesla runs in the United States, because Europe applies different safety and environmental requirements and the software functions are not comparable one-to-one. (bloomberg.com) That distinction matters because Tesla sells the feature with a name that sounds like autonomy, while the legal category here is still assisted driving. RDW says plainly that a vehicle with “Full Self-Driving Supervised” is “not self-driving,” and the driver must remain in control in traffic at all times. (rdw.nl) Tesla had been publicly pushing for this for months. In November 2025 and again in March 2026, the company signaled expected approval dates on X, and RDW responded both times by saying it does not pre-announce outcomes and that safety, not Tesla’s timeline, would decide the result. (rdw.nl 1) (rdw.nl 2) So what changed on April 10 was not that Europe accepted robotaxis. What changed is that one European regulator finished testing one supervised driver-assistance package, cleared it for Dutch roads, and opened the first formal path for Tesla to ask the rest of Europe to follow. (rdw.nl) (bloomberg.com)