By Chris Kirkham and Marie Mannes
June 15 (Reuters) - In its efforts to secure European approval of its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system, Tesla has presented self-published safety statistics to regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands that independent traffic-safety researchers have said amount to misleading marketing.
A Reuters examination published last month found that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other leaders over the past year have increasingly cited statistics they say prove its FSD driver-assistance
feature is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. But the news agency’s review found several invalid data comparisons underlying Tesla’s statistics that exaggerated its safety claims.
Tesla has presented the inflated safety data to some European regulators, according to correspondence obtained by Reuters through public records requests, as the EV maker seeks wider approval of FSD in a region where it is trying to regain market share. Tesla approached RDW, the Dutch road regulator, in late 2024 to begin the FSD approval process.
In a November 2024 letter to RDW, Tesla provided a link to its safety report and claimed “increased usage” of FSD “leads to safer roads.” Tesla charges a monthly subscription for FSD, which can drive itself under certain circumstances but requires the human driver to pay attention.
After more than a year of testing and discussions with Tesla, RDW in April approved FSD for use in the Netherlands. The Dutch regulator is now seeking EU-wide approval on behalf of Tesla.
RDW declined to comment on the issues Reuters identified with Tesla's safety statistics, but the agency said in a statement that it "does not rely on marketing claims or external statistics" to make decisions and performs its own "tests, analyses and verifications" of the system on public roads and test tracks. The agency did not say whether it assessed Tesla's U.S. safety statistics.
RDW said Tesla “collected a lot of data” during testing and the agency “validated, tested and audited all of this data.” RDW did not say what kind of data Tesla collected or what it measured.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
SAVING 32,000 LIVES?
Soon after the Dutch announced the decision on April 10, a Tesla policy manager, Ivan Komusanac, wrote an email to Swedish regulators asking for similar FSD approval. He attached a slide presentation displaying the exaggerated claim that Teslas using FSD can travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average U.S. human driver.
The presentation also claimed FSD could have potentially saved 32,000 lives and prevented 1.9 million injuries.
Researchers interviewed by Reuters said those figures are highly misleading because they are based on the unrealistic assumption that every U.S. vehicle, including freight trucks and crash-prone motorcycles, would be replaced by an FSD-enabled Tesla car – and that every Tesla car is, in fact, at least seven times safer than the one it replaces.
The Reuters examination also found Tesla exaggerates the technology’s safety by comparing a rate of crashes in FSD-piloted Teslas that triggered airbag deployments to a U.S. crash rate for all vehicles that includes far less-severe accidents. The company also compares its cars to the average U.S. vehicle – which is much older than the average Tesla. That distorts the results because automakers have gradually introduced new safety features that reduce crashes.
Anders Eriksson, an investigator at the Swedish Transport Agency, declined to comment on the data Tesla provided, but added that Swedish regulators “look beyond headline figures” and that any assessment of such a system would not be based “solely on aggregated safety claims, but on the overall evidence presented.”
The regulator did not answer Reuters’ questions about what other evidence Tesla provided.
Dudley Curtis, a spokesperson for the watchdog group European Transport Safety Council, said his organization is “certainly concerned” that Tesla presented “unreliable safety data” from the United States to regulators in Sweden, after Reuters told the group about the correspondence.
He added that if Tesla wants to make safety claims, they should “give the data to a university, have it independently verified by a qualified researcher, and then let’s talk.”
TESLA LOOKS TO FSD FOR EUROPEAN REBOUND
Tesla has said FSD approval in Europe is key to vehicle sales growth in the region. The EV maker is still trying to regain market share after sales plummeted last year amid protests over Musk’s political activities, including his embrace of far-right European political parties.
Failing to secure approval could make it harder for Tesla to compete in a region where Chinese EV makers are steadily making inroads.
In the coming months, representatives of 55% of member states that make up 65% of the bloc's population must vote “yes” for FSD to become legal throughout the EU.
In the meantime, individual member states can approve the technology on their own. A regulator in Greece, which said last month the country aims to approve FSD, cited data “from the other side of the Atlantic” that showed “this system ultimately leads to a very significant drop in accidents.”
The Greek transport ministry declined to answer questions about whether the data it cited was from Tesla’s safety report.
Regulators in other European countries have been inundated by drivers citing Tesla’s safety statistics and urging swift approval of FSD, emails showed.
Several Tesla drivers wrote to Norwegian road regulators citing Tesla’s vehicle safety report last autumn. One argued the technology is “significantly safer than average manual driving,” with the potential to “reduce traffic accidents by up to 90% and thus save lives on Norwegian roads.”
Stein-Helge Mundal of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration responded to several Tesla enthusiasts, saying Tesla’s figures “are self-produced,” which makes it “difficult to find correlation with the authorities’ accident statistics.”
(Reporting by Chris Kirkham in Los Angeles and Marie Mannes in Stockholm; Additional reporting by Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing by Mike Colias and Anna Driver)
