Tesla Disputed a €365,000 Invoice and Pressed for Fewer Tests as Dutch Regulators Reviewed FSD, Reuters Reports

Tesla called a €365,000 invoice from the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW "extremely high" and withheld payment until it got an hour-by-hour accounting, according to emails Reuters obtained and Electrek summarized on October 8, 2026. The invoice covered five months of work reviewing Full Self-Driving (Supervised). That is about €73,000 a month, by simple division, for the review that now anchors Tesla's push across Europe.

Electrek's Fred Lambert was summarizing a Reuters investigation published October 7, built on hundreds of pages of correspondence between Tesla and regulators in seven European countries. RDW approved the system, and Dutch approval is the basis for the rest of the campaign.

What the emails show

In November 2024, a Tesla staffer told RDW that starting vehicle tests by the end of that month was "mission critical for our leadership." Per the Reuters account, leadership would judge the regulator's goodwill by whether it met the date.

In April 2025, Tesla objected to the invoice and also to paying for five RDW staffers to visit Giga Berlin. A week later an RDW staffer invited Tesla to suggest how the regulator "might adjust or reduce the required effort moving forward."

The concessions the emails record:

• Tesla argued its own test reports should replace an RDW inspector witnessing tests; RDW offered to monitor part of them remotely.
• Tesla resisted a meeting on over-the-air updates, and an RDW staffer said the regulator did not want to "dive too deep in technical details."
• Tesla asked for advance notice of the specific tests and the names of the safety drivers, and RDW agreed.

RDW told Reuters its engagement with manufacturers does not compromise its assessment. It redacted large parts of the emails and will not publish its FSD test data, citing Tesla's trade secrets.

Secrecy was a separate request

An earlier Reuters report by Chris Kirkham and Marie Mannes, syndicated by Zawya, said Tesla had pressed RDW since late 2024 to keep documents on the review secret. In April 2025, a Tesla representative asked RDW to confirm it would "never" release a particular document and asked how it would be "withheld from public disclosure." RDW replied that public-records disclosure should not be a problem because manufacturers can request an exemption.

That report adds that RDW announced in April that FSD is "safer than other driver assistance systems" and in June that it is "at least as safe as" them, with no supporting data. RDW says it did its own "extensive testing" on closed tracks and public roads, without saying how performance was measured. Regulators in six European countries, including Germany, Norway and Denmark, told Reuters they could not release FSD testing data over trade-secret concerns.

Oliver Carsten, a transportation-safety professor at the University of Leeds, told Reuters: "I don't see any reason why that couldn't be public."

The safety evidence has a denominator problem

Tesla shared an "evidence dashboard" with member states in April and later posted a European study it called "one of the key pieces of evidence" behind the Dutch approval. Seven traffic-safety researchers told Reuters the FSD sample, tens or hundreds of thousands of miles, was too small to compare with hundreds of millions of miles of manual Tesla driving in Europe.

The study used surrogates such as honking, blinker use, and hard braking and cornering instead of crashes, and the FSD cars were driven by Tesla's professional test drivers rather than owners. Tesla's own fine print says the comparisons cannot be read as "causal estimates."

The number that matters is miles between critical disengagements by ordinary customers, and Electrek notes Tesla has not published it. In the U.S., Reuters reported, Tesla compared airbag-deployment crashes on FSD against all towed-car crashes in federal data to claim FSD was 10x safer than human drivers, then revised that to 7x. Reuters says Tesla sent the same research to European regulators.

Where the vote stands

Approval across the bloc requires 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. The Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles did not vote on October 6, the date Tesla had pointed to, and Electrek says a vote could come as early as December.

Status	Countries
Approved FSD (8)	Netherlands, Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
Not approved	Germany, Italy, Spain
Conditional	Sweden wants rejection unless Tesla removes the ability to set speeds above the limit

1. Allow FSD today8 states
2. Needed for approval15 states

Source: Electrek, Oct. 8, 2026, summarizing Reuters, accessed 2026-10-09

France is the movable piece. Transport minister Philippe Tabarot said in July France could not back FSD, and Elon Musk replied that "delaying the approval of FSD in France will cost lives." Tabarot has since posted about a video call with Musk, describing a "constructive exchange" and work on changes that would let France support approval.

Pressure from owners, and the limits of this reporting

Electrek reports that after Musk told shareholders such pressure "would be appreciated," a Tesla X account linked owners to RDW's contact form, and owners sent dozens of emails to regulators in Sweden and Norway. Stein-Helge Mundal of Norway told Reuters: "We do not approve systems because they are popular, and we do not reject them because they are controversial."

The Reuters investigation itself was not available to us; the account above rests on the Electrek summary and the earlier syndicated Reuters report, and Tesla did not respond to Reuters' request for comment in the earlier piece. Electrek's argument that the process is not independent is commentary, not reporting.

For related coverage, see Waymo's first debt deal and the Tesla Semi service center permit in Las Vegas.

What would change this reading: publication of RDW's test results. If they show crash-relevant measures on customer vehicles, the invoice dispute becomes a footnote. If they stay sealed, the vote will rest on the evidence the researchers called too small.