Belgium has become the fifth EU member state to approve Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, making the announcement on 11 June, just one day after Denmark’s clearance of the technology. The approval was signed by Flemish Mobility Minister Annick De Ridder, who announced it on X after Tesla completed a series of in-country tests; approvals granted by any of Belgium’s three regions are valid across all Belgian territories.

The five approvals—Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium, respectively—have all arrived within roughly two months of the Dutch initial type-approval in April, which created a legal anchor other member states can recognise without conducting independent assessments of their own. The rollout is currently restricted to Hardware 4 vehicles, sold from 2023 onwards, and deploys a European variant of the FSD v14 software branch. Sweden and Latvia are reported to be advancing their own paperwork, and Tesla AI Chief Ashok Elluswamy confirmed at the CVPR conference in Denver that a broader EU rollout map is being tracked internally.

A pan-EU approval, however, remains a more challenging proposition. The European Commission’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles requires a vote clearing 55% of member states and 65% of total EU population—thresholds that effectively require sign-off from Germany, France or Italy, none of which has moved toward approval. The EC committee is not expected to vote before October at the earliest, with full EU recognition potentially slipping into early 2027. Germany, France and Italy have each raised concerns about the adequacy of Tesla’s safety data for European road conditions, particularly regarding cyclists, motorcycles and dense urban environments where FSD’s US training base is regarded as an imperfect proxy.

Thus the country-by-country strategy is tactically sound, even if the gains it has offered Tesla are modest at best. The five approvals so far represent smaller and mid-sized markets; the three major EU automotive economies—Germany, France and Italy—are precisely the markets where FSD penetration would most meaningfully shift Tesla’s European competitive position, and they are the least likely to follow quickly.

The EU’s regulatory architecture compounds the challenge. The EU AI Act classifies autonomous driving software as high-risk, requiring extensive pre-deployment documentation for every over-the-air update rather than the iterative release-and-fix approach Tesla uses elsewhere. GDPR creates additional friction over fleet data collection practices. European transport safety groups including the ETSC are actively lobbying the Commission to halt progress toward continent-wide approval pending public safety audits—a political headwind that approvals by individual countries do not resolve.

Tesla’s FSD European expansion is proceeding faster than sceptics predicted a year ago, and the momentum from five approvals in two months cannot be overlooked. It is a rare bright spot in a track record for Tesla’s autonomous driving programme where regulatory bodies offer the automaker a degree of leniency.

Still, the harder half of the map—those large western European markets where regulatory culture is more demanding and public scepticism of Tesla’s brand deepest—has not yet moved, and nothing in the current approval mechanism compels it to.