Tesla Defends Self-Driving Safety with 100 Million KM of European Data

Tesla is pushing hard to win broader European Union approval for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) supervised system, armed with fresh safety data. The headline figure? The system recorded about 4.1 times fewer collisions than manual driving in the five European countries where it's currently allowed. That's a bold claim — and regulators are watching closely.

Over 100 Million Kilometers of Real-World Data

The American automaker based its results on more than 100 million kilometers (62 million miles) of driving data collected between April and August. During that window, Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD were involved in just 3 highway collisions and 9 non-highway crashes, compared to 137 and 490 respectively for manually driven cars. The gap is substantial — but is the comparison fair?

First European Approvals for FSD

Netherlands became the first European nation to grant temporary approval in April. Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, and Lithuania followed suit, boosting Tesla's hopes for a broader EU-wide green light. The company is now intensifying its lobbying efforts ahead of an expected vote on expanding the technology's usage across the bloc.

Yet the data faces serious scrutiny from regulators and safety experts. Earlier reports suggested that the safety statistics Tesla submitted to European authorities relied on invalid comparisons that could mislead the public about the system's true performance. Experts argue that comparing FSD-equipped vehicles against an entire fleet of manual cars doesn't account for different driving conditions and driver behaviors.

In a move aimed at boosting transparency, Tesla published an open-source safety dashboard on its website Tuesday. The company says it had already shared this data with EU regulators back in April, well before the current debate intensified over how the numbers were gathered and interpreted.

The stakes couldn't be higher. A broader European approval would open a massive market of hundreds of millions of potential drivers for Tesla's FSD software, and serve as a major boost for the company's shift toward a software-driven business model with monthly subscriptions at its core.