Europe has found a way to make a self-driving car more dangerous: let it drive, but forbid it to drive like a driver. Brussels is reportedly discussing a rule for authorising Tesla FSD in Europe: the system may never exceed the speed limit by more than 10%. Sounds reasonable, until you remember who’s still in the driver’s seat. Legally that’s you. You’re responsible for every metre the car travels, every lane change, every brake. Yet the system is forbidden to match the flow of traffic, to accelerate out of a dangerous merge, or to get past a truck drifting into your lane. You carry the liability. The committee keeps the steering wheel. This isn’t about cars. It’s about a mindset. Adulthood starts with responsibility. You decide, you act, you answer for the result. That’s the deal every functioning society rests on. And it’s precisely the deal the European regulatory machine can’t stand, because an adult who decides for himself doesn’t need a regulator. First, you take away responsibility, gently and always ‘for your safety’. Then people stop exercising judgment, because judgment is no longer required, or even allowed. People who aren’t allowed to judge become victims: of their car, their employer, their own choices. Victims need protectors. Protectors need more rules. More rules take away more responsibility. The machine feeds itself, and every turn of the wheel proves to the bureaucrat how indispensable he is. The genius of the nanny state is that its failures always justify more nanny state. If FSD causes an accident, we needed stricter rules. If it doesn’t, the strict rules worked. There is no outcome in which the conclusion is ‘maybe trust people.’ And it’s not limited to the roads. It’s the same reflex that buries a start-up under compliance before it has found its first customer. The same reflex that treats risk as a moral failing rather than the price of progress. It’s why Europe regulates AI it didn’t build, platforms it didn’t create and cars it didn’t design, and then wonders why the builders are all in California, Texas or Shenzhen. A continent that trains its citizens to wait for permission shouldn’t be surprised when nobody takes the initiative. Meanwhile the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark etc. have let drivers use FSD (Supervised), and the sky hasn’t fallen. In France we are still convening the committee that will schedule the study on whether citizens can be trusted with cruise control. @PhilippeTabarot, take all the time you need. The roads aren’t going anywhere. Neither, apparently, are the 1,450 people who died on them between April and August. The question was never whether FSD is perfect. Human drivers aren’t either. The question is who decides: the adult who’s legally responsible, or the institution that will never be. Treat every adult like a child long enough, and you won’t get a safer society. You’ll get a society of children, and a state that’s very proud of babysitting them. @teslaeurope @EU_Commission @gouvernementFR