EU postpones vote on Tesla's Full Self-Driving system to December

The European Union will not hold a vote on TSLA's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system on October 6, and the next scheduled session of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV), in December, is now the earliest date a bloc-wide decision could occur .

The draft agenda for the 119th TCMV meeting lists only a 25-minute "continuation of discussions" on the Netherlands' Article 39 request, not a decision, and the committee has already discussed the request twice without voting . Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858 . Elon Musk's reply to the delay was a single word: "Sigh."

That Dutch approval is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. Seven countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia, together about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population . An EU-wide authorization needs a qualified majority of at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc's population. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets, and France has already rejected the current system, while several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point .

What to watch: the December TCMV agenda, and whether any of the large holdout states shifts position on speed-limit compliance. Tesla Europe said on September 1 that FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, a company-reported figure that is not independently audited. The system is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible .