Following the provisional EU type-approval of FSD (Supervised) by the Dutch type approval authority RDW¹, and other national authorisations² in Lithuania and Estonia, but also in Belgium, where a testing programme was authorised in the Flemish region, or Greece, where a bill to authorise FSD was announced, the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) calls Member States to refrain from doing so until there is transparent deliberation at EU or UN level and real-world safety evidence from Dutch roads.

RDW’s own explanation of the approval is that FSD (Supervised) “is not self-driving”: the driver remains legally responsible and must be ready to take over immediately. The system monitors – triggering warnings and even a temporary lock-out based on – the driver’s attention and “ability” to grip the wheel. ETSC has sent detailed questions to RDW about the evidence behind its approval, the workings of the driver-monitoring system, and the extent to which the US investigations³ were taken into account.

Driver assistance systems will be on the agenda of a European Commission Motor Vehicle Working Group meeting next week, where ETSC hopes to set out its safety concerns about FSD deployment on European roads, in particular human-factor risks such as driver over-reliance on systems that still require active supervision. They have also asked the Commission for open discussions on the matter, involving civil society and road safety experts, and that no implementing act should be adopted until that public deliberation has run its course.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom and Japan have called for UNECE regulatory work on Driver Control Assistance Systems (DCAS) to be paused, while experience is gained with the currently-allowed implementations of the system.

Source: The original articles were published here and here

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1. 1. The variant of FSD approved by the RDW for EU use is not identical to the US FSD product covered by a Reuters investigation concluded that the related safety statistics published in the United States are built on flawed methodology. ↩︎
2. 2. Other Member States can, in principle, recognise the Dutch provisional approval nationally without waiting for the Commission’s implementing act authorising the approval for the system to be used across the EU. ↩︎
3. 3. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has two active independent investigations into FSD: one, recently escalated, into the system’s failure to detect or warn the driver when its cameras are degraded; another into traffic law violations including running red lights. ↩︎