Tesla has been granted permission to test its supervised self-driving software on one car in Belgium after a Flanders regional spokesperson confirmed authorization on Wednesday. The permission comes from the office of regional minister Annick De Ridder and will be effective across the whole of Belgium.
The automaker may commence on-road testing once the vehicle receives a license plate and insurance. Those administrative steps could be completed as soon as Wednesday or Friday, the spokesperson said, noting that Thursday is a public holiday in Belgium.
The authorization delivered by Flanders follows a recent provisional approval by the Dutch regulator, which allowed the same supervised software to operate on roads in the Netherlands last month. The Dutch decision made the Netherlands the first European Union country to permit the technology. The software is designed to control a vehicle while requiring drivers to remain attentive.
Under the Belgian approval, the single Tesla will be driven for an estimated 5,000 kilometers. The purpose of that mileage is to observe whether the vehicle’s performance or the software’s behavior differs in any material way from operations on Dutch roads, including potential interactions with local road infrastructure and national traffic rules. Minister De Ridder said the results will be assessed following the test, and that positive findings would allow expedited work toward a provisional European type approval.
The scope of the authorization is explicitly limited to one vehicle for the trial phase. The Flanders approval is stated to apply across all Belgian territory rather than being confined solely to the Flanders region.
Context and next steps
The immediate prerequisites before on-road activity are routine administrative items: registration and insurance for the vehicle. The timeline provided by the regional spokesperson indicates those could be completed within days, subject to the holiday schedule noted for Thursday.
The 5,000-kilometer test run is intended to generate data on how the supervised system copes with Belgian road conditions and regulatory differences compared with the Netherlands. If the testing yields favorable outcomes, Flanders officials indicated that they would move quickly to support provisional European type approval processes.