Tesla’s driver-assistance package is now called “Tesla Assisted Driving” in Europe. The company’s German website no longer mentions “Full Self-Driving,” and the old address now redirects to a new “Tesla Assisted Driving” page.
The rename follows Germany’s Transport Ministry calling the FSD name misleading, and it’s part of a deal that has Berlin backing Tesla’s push for EU-wide approval.
Germany wanted a new name, and Tesla offered one
In a statement published October 6, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport (BMV) wrote that the name of the system formerly sold as “FSD – Full Self-Driving Supervised” is misleading because the system doesn’t take over the full driving task. The driver has to pay attention at all times and remains fully responsible for the car.
Tesla offered to rename it “Tesla Assisted Driving” during talks with Transport Minister Steffen Bilger in September, according to the ministry.
They also agreed on speed. Germany says the system can go up to 10% over the speed limit, and it will back that position in the EU approval process. Tesla will need to change FSD to make that happen as it often goes way beyond 10% of the limit.
That’s a real concession from Tesla. Reuters reported that the version approved in the Netherlands allows speeds up to 50% over the detected limit.
In return, Bilger says he wants Tesla drivers to be able to use the system across the EU as quickly as possible. Musk thanked Germany on X with a “Danke schoen.”
Same pitch, new name
The rebrand is mostly a find-and-replace job. Not much else changed.
Tesla’s new German page is a translation of its US FSD page with the product name swapped out. It still says the car will drive you “almost anywhere” under your active supervision with minimal intervention. It still claims the system is “7x safer” than human drivers, a figure Tesla’s own footnote says is measured against the estimated US average. And it still ends with a section titled “Die Zukunft ist autonom” (“The future is autonomous”) that promotes Robotaxi and Cybercab.
Back in the US, tesla.com/fsd is still selling “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” for $99 a month.
Tesla’s page lists eight EU countries where the system is approved: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia. Germany isn’t on the list yet. As we reported last month, the EU vote has slipped to December at the earliest, and bloc-wide approval needs 15 of 27 member states representing 65% of the EU population. France and Sweden have both raised concerns about speeding.
Electrek’s Take
This should be the name everywhere, and Tesla knows it.
“Full Self-Driving” was an aspiration when Tesla started selling it. In October 2016, Tesla said every car it was building had the hardware for full self-driving. At its Autonomy Day in April 2019, Musk said FSD would be “feature complete” by the end of that year and that Tesla would have over a million robotaxis on the road in 2020. You could argue the name was a bet on the future back then. A bad bet, but a bet.
Tesla has missed that target every single year since. It’s now been almost exactly 10 years since the 2016 announcement, and Tesla has admitted that the cars it sold as self-driving capable from 2016 to 2023 don’t have the hardware to do it. So at what point does an aspirational name become a false one? A California judge answered that last December, calling the name “unambiguously false and counterfactual.”
Top comment by ðºð¦ = ðµð¸ Neale Upstone ð
And it's a TAD late too.
I have to pinch myself when I read that AI Autonomy Day was in April 2019! It's no surprise that the Model 3 I bought later that year "with full-self driving capable hardware" was something I expected to actually do the job because Tesla had been doing demos of the car driving someone from home to work.
This is not "corporate puffery" - it's fraud, plain and simple. They lied about that demo drive and potentially millions of people bought a car believing it. Add to that that in many EU countries, people who paid for FSD still don't have TAD, and many of them can't get it without a hardware upgrade.
Tesla’s fix was to lean on “Supervised,” which is ridiculous. Self-driving means the car drives itself. Supervised means it doesn’t. “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” contradicts itself within four words, and we think Tesla only held on to it because dropping it would mean admitting what it sold customers for a decade.
Now it dropped the name in Europe the moment a regulator it needed asked.
If “Tesla Assisted Driving” is the honest name in Berlin, why isn’t it the name in California?
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