Both listed "problems" explicitly state there is no issue to fix ("No issue." / "No problem. (Included in error.)"). Their instructed fix is "remove," which refers to removing the erroneous problem entries themselves, not editing the article. Since neither identifies a genuine correction to apply, the article stays byte-for-byte identical.
"Trust us on this, we tested it extensively."
That is Bernd van Nieuwenhoven, General Manager of the Dutch vehicle authority RDW, describing the safety file that six European countries have now used to authorize Tesla's Full Self-Driving on their public roads.
The file itself is sealed. Van Nieuwenhoven's sentence is not a summary of the public record. It is the public record.
The file itself is sealed. Van Nieuwenhoven's sentence is not a summary of the public record. It is the public record.
Hold that quote for a moment, because an ocean away, the opposite regulatory philosophy just produced the same hole.
Tesla reportedly marked the Cybercab's Austin launch with hundreds of fans downtown — a golden, butterfly-door two-seater with no steering wheel, no pedals, no traditional mirrors. By September 4, NHTSA had opened Audit Query AQ26002.
Not a crash probe. An audit of the reasoning Tesla used to decide that steering wheels and pedals no longer count.
Read the agency's own language. AQ26002 will "evaluate the technical data and processes Tesla relied upon to self-certify compliance for a vehicle lacking traditional human controls," and will examine "whether Tesla's compliance framework relied on determinations that certain standard FMVSS requirements are inapplicable."
That is a government auditing an assertion. After the fact. On roughly 1,000 vehicles, 45 already plated in Texas, some reportedly carrying paying riders through a geofenced slice of Austin.
Last week in this newsletter, the EU-wide vote was a pending question and the NHTSA audit was a rumor. This week the audit is live, and six EU states have signed on to a certification none of them independently checked. The pending has become the actual.
Start with the American side, because it is the cleaner case of a system built to verify nothing up front.
In the United States, automakers self-certify. They assert their vehicles meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, put them on the road, and the regulator inspects later if something looks wrong. That is the design, not a loophole.
The wrinkle is that the FMVSS were written for human-driven cars. They assume a brake pedal, a windshield wiper, a rearview mirror. NHTSA is rewriting eight of those rules — but, in its own words, "until that work is completed, existing standards remain in force."
So there is a gap. And into that gap, Tesla drove a car with no controls at all, then declared it compliant with rules written around controls it deleted.
This is where the contrast with a competitor matters. Amazon's Zoox — also steering-wheel-free — asked NHTSA for an explicit exemption and received one this summer, reportedly cleared for up to 2,500 vehicles this year. Tesla did not petition. It self-certified.
Ann Carlson, a former acting NHTSA administrator, called that choice "gobsmacking," given how clearly the Zoox process set expectations. Michael Brooks of the Center for Auto Safety put the engineering objection plainly: "I don't think there is a reasonable interpretation that can be made to suggest that the Cybercab can comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards."
Now notice what an audit query actually is. It is not a recall, not a stop-service order, not a finding of non-compliance. The cars keep running while NHTSA reverse-engineers the math Tesla already did.
Carnegie Mellon's Philip Koopman described the endgame precisely: Tesla offers a "creative interpretation," calls the Cybercab compliant, and "floods the market." Resolving that "could take NHTSA or state regulators years. Meanwhile, Tesla could be operating on public roads."
Deployment first. Verification maybe, later, if the agency can catch up. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Cross the Atlantic and you find the mirror image — a system that requires clearance before launch — arriving at the identical dead end.
The Dutch RDW granted provisional type approval in April 2026 under UN Regulation 171, plus Article 39 exemptions for behaviors the rules don't otherwise permit: hands-free lane changes, certain urban modes. Under EU Regulation 2018/858, other member states can then accept that certification without repeating the review.
Lithuania followed in May. Estonia in late May. Denmark in June. Belgium on June 10. Slovenia became the sixth on September 7.
Not one of the five that followed the Netherlands conducted an independent safety review. They adopted a certification.
And the certification — the test results, the data, the actual safety reasoning behind the April 10 approval — is sealed as commercial secret at Tesla's request. No research released. No supporting data public.
Which returns us to van Nieuwenhoven's sentence. "Trust us on this, we tested it extensively" is not a regulator's shorthand for a documented finding. It is the entire justification, standing alone, because the document underneath it cannot be read.
So the two systems, philosophically opposite, converge on one fact. In neither the US self-cert audit nor the EU sealed-file chain has any independent party verified Tesla's autonomy. The only entity that has checked the math is Tesla.
That leaves exactly one number on the public table — and it is Tesla's.
On September 1, ahead of the EU push, Tesla reported that FSD Supervised logged 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas across the five approved countries: three highway collisions and nine on other roads over 100 million kilometers, against 137 and 490 for human drivers.
Reuters has previously reported that experts said Tesla's safety statistics to European regulators "relied on invalid comparisons and could give a misleading impression" of the system's performance. Tesla did not answer detailed questions for that report.
So the single verifiable figure is a comparison flagged as invalid, produced by the party being regulated, resting on a dataset no outside expert can audit.
The opacity is not incidental. It is patterned.
Look at the American crash files. A September 1 Electrek investigation matched five redacted Tesla entries to fatal Level 2 crashes — Clute, Lake Mary, Mesa, Batavia, Moraine. Every one listed the assistance system as "Verified Engaged," and every one recorded a death.
In all five, Tesla claimed two fields as confidential business information: the crash narrative, and whether the vehicle was within its intended operating domain.
Read what that redaction removes. The public file cannot show which software version was running, what the system did in the seconds before impact, or whether the driver intervened.
The same instinct — seal the operating-domain data, seal the narrative, seal the Dutch test results — runs through both continents. What gets withheld is precisely the information an outsider would need to check the safety claim.
Which is what makes October 6 the pressure point.
That is when the EU's Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles is expected to vote on converting the six-country patchwork into a single authorization across all 27 states. It needs a qualified majority: 55% of member states and 65% of the bloc's population.
The six approving countries hold about 41.9 million people — roughly 9% of the EU. To clear 65%, at least one of France, Germany, or Italy must vote yes. None has approved FSD nationally. France is running its own road tests to verify Tesla's data before taking a position.
So the arithmetic does not close. Which is why Tesla's play is not arithmetic — it is momentum.
The bet, as the sealed-file coverage frames it: a country that declines to block a system its neighbors already run legally faces a softer question than one asked to approve something untested. Sweden's Transport Administration told the committee on April 30 to vote no unless Tesla removed the ability to exceed posted speed limits. By September 2, Sweden's infrastructure minister was saying EU-wide approval "should be put in place."
Whether the speed-offset concern was fixed or simply deprioritized, no one outside the process can say — because the process is sealed.
That is the whole shape of it. Six approvals, built by copying one file no one may read. A federal audit chasing an assertion on cars already carrying riders. A single safety number, from the company, already called invalid.
The October 6 vote is not being asked to weigh evidence. It is being asked to ratify momentum — to treat "the cars are already running next door" as if it were the same thing as "someone independent checked the math."
It isn't. On either continent, no one has.