France’s Transport Minister, Philippe Tabarot, says the country won’t authorize Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised) “as it currently stands,” pointing to two safety problems: the system lets drivers speed, and it doesn’t keep them attentive enough in cities.
But this isn’t France slamming the door on Tesla. It’s France refusing to rubber-stamp the Netherlands’ national approval and holding out for a proper EU-wide sign-off.
What Tabarot actually said
The minister laid out France’s position in a video statement, answering a question about when FSD will be cleared in France. His answer: not yet.
“The safety trade-offs are not yet sufficient to authorize it as it currently stands,” Tabarot said, adding a line Tesla owners will recognize as the crux of the whole European fight: the system “is not a self-driving system.”
He gave two concrete reasons. First, speeding. “We’ve found that the system allows for speeding,” he said. Second, driver attention. According to France’s own data, FSD “doesn’t guarantee an optimal level of driver attention in urban settings and during the most complex maneuvers, such as lane changes, intersections, or roundabouts.”
So what happens next? France says it’s still working the problem. Tabarot said the country is continuing technical discussions with the Netherlands, other European states, and Tesla, and that a Ministry of Transport representative traveled to the Netherlands last week to dig into the data. This autumn, he plans to bring together the French autonomous-vehicle ecosystem to set a direction.
And the tone matters here. This wasn’t a Tesla takedown. “France supports these technologies,” Tabarot said, framing the delay as a matter of trust and data rather than opposition. “We have real cards to play, and we’re ready to play them, but never at the expense of safety on our roads.”
Why France won’t just follow the Netherlands
Here’s the part the headlines flattened. France isn’t blocking FSD in Europe. It can’t. It’s declining to activate it on French roads off the back of another country’s decision.
Tesla got FSD Supervised approved in the Netherlands in April, the first EU country to do it, through the Dutch RDW. Since then it’s rolled out country by country, with Denmark becoming the fourth in June. The RDW has been pushing to turn its national exemption into an EU-wide type approval through the European Commission and UNECE.
France doesn’t want to validate FSD on that basis. It wants a harmonized European framework with common test protocols before it signs off, not a patchwork built on one national regulator’s call. That’s a slower path, but it’s a defensible one, and it’s the whole point of Tabarot’s message: France will get on board when Europe does, together.
France also isn’t the lone skeptic. In June, Sweden told the EU to reject FSD unless Tesla removes the speeding behavior. European regulators have been raising the same concerns since spring.
The speeding problem is real, and recent
Tabarot’s first complaint isn’t theoretical. Tesla’s FSD has long let drivers set it to exceed the posted limit, and just this month we reported that FSD got me a speeding ticket after Tesla removed the fix that used to cap the offset.
It doesn’t help Tesla’s case in Europe that it presented misleading FSD safety data to regulators, something French authorities have already tangled with before.
Electrek’s Take
France is playing it safe here, and honestly, it’s hard to argue with the logic.
Read the transcript instead of the tweets and it’s not a rejection. It’s a delay with conditions attached, and the conditions are specific and fixable: stop letting the car speed, and prove the driver-monitoring holds up in dense urban driving. Tabarot went out of his way to say France backs the technology. He’s not trying to keep Tesla out. He’s refusing to inherit the Netherlands’ homework without checking it.
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