Tesla touts European supervised self-driving safety data ahead of EU vote

STOCKHOLM, Sept 1 : Tesla's supervised self-driving technology recorded 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Tesla cars in the five European countries where it is permitted, the automaker said on Tuesday, as it steps up lobbying efforts ahead of an EU vote on wider deployment.

The Netherlands in April became the first European country to grant provisional approval for Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, prompting Belgium, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania to follow suit ahead of a European Union vote on broader approval.

Tesla said its findings were based on more than 100 million km (62 million miles) of driving data collected between April and August in those five countries, where FSD-equipped cars were involved in three collisions on highways and nine on non-highway roads, compared with 137 and 490 collisions respectively involving manually driven vehicles.    

Reuters has previously reported that Tesla presented European regulators with safety statistics that experts said relied on invalid comparisons and could give a misleading impression of the system's safety performance. Tesla did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters for that report.

Tesla also posted an open-source safety dashboard on its website on Tuesday, which it said was shared with EU member state regulators in April.

"Leading up to a potential EU-wide approval vote ... we have decided to open-source one of the key pieces of evidence used to support the Netherlands approval," the company said.

Tesla has urged EU regulators to approve broader use of its FSD technology and says a vote could happen as soon as October 6. Approval would require support from at least 15 of the EU's 27 member states representing at least 65 per cent of the bloc's population.

The U.S. EV maker says FSD approval is key to boosting sales in Europe. On Tuesday, registration data showed a mixed sales picture for Tesla on the continent.  

The approval process has faced criticism over a lack of transparency after European regulators, including Dutch road authority RDW, declined to publish safety data underpinning the approval of FSD, saying it is commercially sensitive information.