Tesla FSD Speeding in Brussels 30 km/h Zones Fuels EU Approval Concerns

Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” broke the speed limit in 55% of the 30 km/h segments a Belgian road safety group tested in Brussels, averaging 44 km/h where the legal limit is 30 km/h.

The results land less than two weeks before EU member states vote on approving FSD across the whole bloc. And speeding is exactly the issue Sweden and France have already flagged.

FSD couldn’t tell a 30 zone from a 50 zone

Johanna.be, a Brussels nonprofit that advocates for pedestrian and cyclist safety, published its “FSD30” study today. Its testers spent three days in July and about 400 km behind the wheel, sticking mostly to the low-speed streets where people on foot and on bikes are most exposed.

Speed was the main problem. Beyond the 30 km/h zones, FSD also exceeded the 20 km/h limit in 42% of the “woonerven” (residential shared streets) the group tested.

Part of the reason is that the system often didn’t know the limit. According to Johanna, the car’s screen showed a 50 km/h limit in the majority of the 30 km/h zones it drove through.

Johanna cites WHO data showing that a pedestrian hit at 44 km/h is nearly six times more likely to die than one hit at 30 km/h, which is why Brussels made 30 km/h the default across most of the region back in 2021.

The group also documented FSD repeatedly trying to overtake cyclists in “fietsstraten” (cycle streets), where Belgian traffic rules don’t allow cars to pass cyclists at all.

Johanna does give FSD credit for yielding to pedestrians and cyclists, often before it had to. But in the group’s view, good manners at crosswalks can’t make up for systematic speeding in the places where a mistake is most likely to kill someone.

Johanna sent its findings to the Dutch RDW and the Flemish mobility ministry on September 7 and is asking both to reconsider their approvals before the EU vote.

Belgium already said yes

Flemish Mobility Minister Annick De Ridder signed off on FSD (Supervised) on June 10, after Tesla completed 5,000 km of supervised testing on Flemish roads. That made Belgium one of the first countries to recognize the RDW’s provisional approval.

Asked about the study by Reuters, a spokesperson for the Flemish government said the system is “learning” and that drivers remain “100% responsible.” Tesla didn’t respond.

That’s the standard line for a Level 2 driver assist, and on paper it’s correct. But it raises an obvious question: why approve a system that shows the wrong speed limit in most 30 zones and then tell drivers it’s on them to catch it?

The EU vote hinges on speeding

The Netherlands’ RDW granted FSD (Supervised) a provisional approval under UN Regulation 171 in April. Since then, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia and, as of this week, Czechia have recognized it nationally.

But Tesla’s real target is EU-wide approval. The Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV) is scheduled to vote on October 6. If it passes, the European Commission would extend the RDW’s approval to all 27 member states. It needs a qualified majority: at least 15 countries representing 65% of the EU’s population.

Speeding has been the biggest obstacle. In June, Sweden told the EU to reject FSD unless Tesla removes its ability to exceed speed limits, with Norway and Finland raising the same concern. A month later, France refused to recognize the Dutch approval, with Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot citing speeding and driver attention in cities.

Tesla has countered with its own study claiming FSD vehicles “do not speed excessively” and match the speed of surrounding traffic. So Tesla’s argument is that FSD speeds about as much as the humans around it. Not a great pitch in a city that lowered its limits specifically because humans were driving too fast.

It also isn’t the first time Tesla has leaned on self-published numbers in Europe. We reported in June that the safety data Tesla presented to Dutch and Swedish regulators relied on an apples-to-oranges comparison that inflated FSD’s advantage.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla has spent months telling European regulators that FSD is safe, mostly with its own data. Now an independent group took it into the environment Europe cares about most, dense city streets full of pedestrians and bikes, and found it couldn’t reliably tell a 30 zone from a 50 zone.

Reading a speed limit sign is a basic task. It’s not an edge case, and anyone unbiased who regularly uses FSD will tell you that it is absolutely terrible at it.

We’ve run into this ourselves. FSD got us a speeding ticket in July after doing 78 km/h in a 50 zone, and Tesla had removed the setting that would have prevented it. Belgium shows the same pattern. The software decides what speed feels right, and the driver pays for it, sometimes with a ticket and sometimes with something much worse.

The Flemish government’s “the driver is 100% responsible” line is a cop-out. Regulators aren’t approving the driver. They’re approving the software, and the software sped in most of the 30 zones tested.

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