Tesla said on Tuesday that its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software has been approved in Croatia, and the company plans to start the rollout soon without naming a date.
Croatia joins the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia and Czechia, so eight EU member states now permit the system on their roads.
The news came from Tesla’s Europe, Middle East and Africa X account, which said customer cars in Croatia would receive the software soon. The decision stands out when you look at the timeline. Croatia’s State Office for Metrology, the body in charge of vehicle approvals, said earlier in September that it had not accepted the Dutch approval and had not seen documentation that answered its main safety questions. Nineteen days later Tesla announced the green light, and the office had not posted any statement of its own by the time of reporting. The exact terms of the approval are still not public, so “Tesla says” is the accurate framing until the regulator publishes its side.
How the Dutch decision opened the door
The legal path runs through the Netherlands. The Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted a provisional national type approval on April 10 after about 18 months of testing, and other EU countries can accept that decision for their own territory. Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium took that step in the months after, and Slovenia and Czechia followed in September.
FSD (Supervised) is a Level 2 driver-assistance system and not a self-driving car in the legal sense. It can steer, accelerate, brake, change lanes, follow a navigation route and handle turns, but the driver has to watch the road and stay ready to take over at any moment.
The wider EU vote
A bloc-wide rollout is a separate question and it has not moved. Extending the Dutch approval to all 27 member states needs a qualified majority of at least 15 countries representing 65% of the EU population. A vote had been talked about for October, but the October 6 agenda of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only discussion time and the committee does not meet again until December. Any EU-wide decision now sits in December at the earliest and could slip further.
The timing is awkward for Tesla in one respect. The European Transport Safety Council asked regulators this week to reject the system’s speed-offset function, which can let the car run up to 50% above the speed limit it detects. The group said this function was not part of the exemptions Tesla requested under the applicable rules, and its call landed one day before the Croatia announcement.
Tesla has published its own European test evidence ahead of these decisions. The company says its engineering fleet covered about 1.6 million kilometres in Europe with no major or minor collision linked to FSD performance, and it reports more than 230,000 fixed-route scenario tests in six European cities with no safety-critical events and a pass rate above 99%.
Tesla delivers FSD through an over-the-air update once a market is cleared, and the company’s message for Croatia promised only that the rollout would start “soon.” Owners there will need to wait for the update to reach their cars.
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