In a bid to secure European approval for its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system, Tesla has reportedly furnished regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with self-published safety statistics that independent traffic-safety researchers deem misleading marketing.

A Reuters investigation last month revealed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other executives have increasingly touted figures claiming its FSD driver-assistance feature is up to ten times safer than human drivers.

However, the news agency’s analysis uncovered several invalid data comparisons underpinning Tesla’s statistics, which exaggerated its safety assertions.

This inflated safety data was presented to certain European regulators, as evidenced by correspondence obtained by Reuters via public records requests.

The electric vehicle manufacturer is seeking broader FSD approval in a region where it aims to reclaim market share. Tesla initiated the FSD approval process with RDW, the Dutch road regulator, in late 2024. A November 2024 letter to RDW included a link to its safety report, asserting that greater FSD usage contributes 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 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 Reutersquestions 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 Musks 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 Teslas 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 Teslas 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.”