The Netherlands has become the first country in Europe to approve Tesla’s self-driving tech, with its Full-Self Driving (Supervised) now available for Dutch Tesla drivers. After over one million kilometres of testing and a social media campaign, the self-driving tech has been approved for use by Dutch law makers for highway and city street use. The Netherlands is the first country in Europe to approve the mass self-driving tech, and more European countries are expected to follow.

The system, which will become an optional extra via a subscription on models like the Model 3 sedan and Model Y medium SUV, allows the cars to drive themselves on highways, city streets and everything in between – as long as a destination is set.

But as we’ve seen locally, it’s not a fully autonomous system, as the Supervised part of the Full-Self Driving (Supervised) name suggests: the driver must be fully alert while the car is in self-driving mode, otherwise it will deactivate.

Tesla FSD
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Buyers of the tech also must pass an in-car safety training quiz before activating it, which is called the FSD (Supervised) Activation Tutorial by Tesla.

Unlike LiDAR tech that brands like Volvo use, Tesla’s autonomous tech uses various sensors and cameras mounted around the car, which feed the onboard computer. According to Tesla, collisions are seven times less likely when FSD is activated and until now, drivers using the FSD tech have covered more than 14 billion kilometres.

Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (Supervised) tech is currently available optionally in Australia on both the Model 3 and Model Y, priced at $149 per month.