In the past few hours, there has been two major announcements that significantly impact Tesla’s FSD deployments in a positive way.
1. FSD (Supervised) approved in Norway
New documents released after a Freedom of information request to Norway regulators reveal that Tesla has secured a 2-year exemption to run FSD (Supervised) on public roads in Norway.
This is achieved by way of an exemption to UN Reg. 79 on Section 17-2 of the Motor Vehicle Regulation. This enables Tesla to run vehicles running FSD V13 in Norway.
Right now the requirement for this exemption is that the vehicles be operated by Tesla employees, and people who have been trained, however it doesn’t explicitly call out what level of training is required. Anyone at Tesla involved in the development and testing of FSD is clearly going ot be across what the software does and how it works.
This will now take the number of locations that FSD (Supervised) is available to 6.
United States (October 2020)
Canada (September 2022)
Mexico (Feb 2025)
Peurto Rico (Feb 2025)
China (Feb 2025)
Europe aka Norway (approval April 2025)
It is really encouraging to see Tesla are not waiting for the full UNECE approval process which seems moving slower Gary.
With approvals happening for some EU regions (Kees suggests others aren’t far behind), this will place pressure on the UNECE’s GRVA working group for Autonomous Vehicles to accelerate their approvals.
This also gives fresh hope to the Australian availability of FSD (Supervised). The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications engaged the National Transport Commission to align state-based regulation to the UNECE standards after a meeting of the Infrastructure and Transport Ministers back in 2022.
Unfortunately there have been no meetings of this Infrastructure and Transport Ministers since June 2024 – https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure-transport-vehicles/transport-strategy-policy/infrastructure-and-transport-ministers-meetings.
The NTC have also been painfully slow in their work, on pause as the Government is placed in caretaker mode during the federal election.
Technically there’s nothing stopping Tesla today from rollout out FSD (Supervised), however there is uncertainty in how regulations will end up as a result of the UNECE regulation.
An exemption from this would help Tesla develop and test a RHD model in Australia without fear of impending regulatory changes, if not, Australia risks being left behind the rest of the world as FSD continues to roll out.
BREAKING: Tesla just secured a 2-year exemption to run FSD (Supervised) on public roads in Norway 🇳🇴
Not in theory
Not in simulation
But with real cars, live software and government oversight
Approved by Statens vegvesen (Norwegian Road Authority), this test program allows:
•… pic.twitter.com/sUn5DNeHOk
— Kees Roelandschap (@KRoelandschap) April 24, 2025
2. Nation-wide regulation for Autonomous Vehicles for the US
The second win for Tesla is the announcement that the US will move to a nation-wide approval process for Autonomous Vehicles.
Tesla has been very clear they launching FSD (unsupervised) in June in Austin, followed by San Francisco. The plan from there is to continue to roll out availability of the driverless technology.
Without nation-wide approval, Tesla (and others) would be faced with state-by-state approval processes and with 50 to deal with, it seems unlikely they’d be able to achieve that by the end of this year.
A nation-wide approval process should be rigorous, and confirm the technology approach to autonomous vehicles can meet a benchmark in safety, as we do with crash testing.
In the video from U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, he points to an innovation race between the US and China who is also progressing rapidly in the Autonomy space.
Tesla’s head of Autopilot and AI at Tesla, Ashok Elluswamy replied ‘Love to see this’, clearly a nod to the fact his job just got a whole lot easier.
