Tesla disputed a €365,000 bill — and Europe's FSD safety review shrank

Internal documents obtained by Reuters show the Dutch vehicle authority RDW scaled back parts of its safety review of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system after a billing row. In April 2025 Tesla disputed RDW’s €365,000 invoice for five months of review work as ‘extremely high’ and withheld payment. One week later an RDW employee invited Tesla to propose how to reduce the effort involved. The regulator then accepted Tesla’s own test reports instead of an on-site inspector, agreed not to dig deep into over-the-air updates, and shared the test list and safety driver names in advance.

The review had already been unusually light. RDW's analysis took a year and a half on hybrid data — partly its own testing, partly analysis supplied by Tesla — and ran about 13,000 kilometers of real-world testing, against the millions of kilometers conventional type-approval procedures involve. In November 2024 a Tesla employee told the authority that starting vehicle tests that month was 'mission critical' for the company's leadership, adding that top management would read the regulator's goodwill in meeting the deadline.

The data Tesla supplied was contested. Its study claimed FSD-equipped cars crash up to ten times less often than manually driven ones; seven traffic-safety researchers who examined the paper found it does not hold up — the FSD sample was tiny against hundreds of millions of manually driven kilometers, the comparison measured surrogates like braking and honking rather than crashes, the FSD cars were piloted by Tesla's own professional test drivers, and Tesla's own fine print concedes the comparisons cannot support any causal claim.

By October 2026 RDW had granted temporary approval, with seven other countries including Belgium following, ahead of a decisive European decision expected in December. France found the onboard camera did not monitor driver attention precisely enough and Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot rejected approval — though after a call with Elon Musk he said he remained hopeful. Tesla offered to rename FSD (Supervised) ‘Assisted Driving’ and cut Offset Speeding from 50% to 10%; Musk publicly urged followers to pressure European regulators.

No fine — the cost is exposure: a Reuters documents investigation, seven researchers rejecting its crash data, France refusing approval, and scrutiny of the EU process.

Withholding payment tied to review depth handed a regulator a financial reason to narrow its own scrutiny.

Tesla's own study was built to flatter the product: tiny FSD sample, surrogate measures, company drivers — and fine print disclaiming causality.

A 13,000 km real-world program made Tesla-supplied data decisive, since conventional approvals run on millions of kilometers.

Pre-sharing the test list and safety driver names with the company undercut the independence the approval process rests on.

Leaning on a regulator works until it is documented: a billing dispute before a softened review reads as pressure, and safety data your own fine print disclaims will meet people who read fine print.

As of October 9, 2026, temporary approvals were live in the Netherlands and seven more countries, the decisive EU-wide decision was expected in December, and France had refused. RDW maintained its independence was never compromised, but edited large portions of the very correspondence that would prove it and declined to publish its own test results, citing trade secrets under its agreement with Tesla.