Tesla put self-published safety statistics in front of regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands that independent traffic-safety researchers say amount to misleading marketing, according to a Reuters review of correspondence obtained through public-records requests.
The data was part of the company’s push to win wider European approval for its Full Self-Driving system, in a region where Tesla is trying to recover lost market share.
The headline claim Tesla and its executives have leaned on is that FSD is up to ten times safer than a human driver. Reuters reported finding several invalid comparisons beneath that figure, the kind that make a number look more impressive than the underlying data supports.
One slide is illustrative. Tesla told regulators that cars running FSD can travel more than seven times farther between crashes than the average US driver. Researchers said the figure leans on an unrealistic assumption: that every vehicle on US roads would be swapped for an FSD-equipped Tesla, and that each of those Teslas is at least seven times safer than the car it replaced. Stated that way, the claim is less a measurement than a hypothetical.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!A second problem is what is being compared. Some of Tesla’s figures count only the more serious crashes in its own fleet, the ones severe enough to deploy an airbag, while setting them against broad crash statistics that sweep in many minor incidents.
