Tesla put self-published safety statistics in front of regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands that independent traffic-safety researchers say amount to misleading marketing, according to a Reuters review of correspondence obtained through public-records requests.
The data was part of the company’s push to win wider European approval for its Full Self-Driving system, in a region where Tesla is trying to recover lost market share.
The headline claim Tesla and its executives have leaned on is that FSD is up to ten times safer than a human driver. Reuters reported finding several invalid comparisons beneath that figure, the kind that make a number look more impressive than the underlying data supports.
One slide is illustrative. Tesla told regulators that cars running FSD can travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average US driver. Researchers said the figure leans on an unrealistic assumption: that every vehicle on US roads would be swapped for an FSD-equipped Tesla, and that each of those Teslas is at least seven times safer than the car it replaced. Stated that way, the claim is less a measurement than a hypothetical.
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A second problem is what is being compared. Some of Tesla’s figures count only the more serious crashes in its own fleet, the ones severe enough to deploy an airbag, while setting them against broad crash statistics that sweep in many minor incidents.
Comparing a narrow category of accidents against a wide one, safety experts told Reuters, can manufacture an impression of performance that a like-for-like comparison would not.
The watchdogs are paying attention. Dudley Curtis of the European Transport Safety Council said his organisation is “certainly concerned” that Tesla presented “unreliable safety data” from the United States to regulators in Sweden. The concern is not only that the numbers flatter the system, but that they were offered to officials whose job is to decide whether the system is safe to widen on European roads.
The data dispute lands on top of doubts regulators had already raised. European officials have questioned FSD over speeding, icy-road behaviour, and driver distraction, and the name itself has drawn objections, with Dutch regulators among those uneasy that “Full Self-Driving” oversells a system that still requires a human to supervise it. Approval has looked uncertain for months.
The Netherlands matters more than most here, because its vehicle authority is the lead body assessing FSD for the European market, which makes the quality of the data Tesla submits a gating factor rather than a side issue. Tesla has not, in the reporting, retracted the figures.
What happens next sits with the regulators weighing them, and a safety case built on comparisons researchers have called invalid is a weaker hand than the headline number suggests.
