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Tesla FSD Approved in Slovenia, Mountain Road Footage Shows V14 Handling Sharp Turns Ahead of V15 Upgrade
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software has picked up its sixth European approval, and footage now circulating from Slovenia’s mountain roads is giving a real-world look at how the system handles terrain that would challenge most human drivers. Slovenia’s Traffic Safety Agency confirmed to Reuters that it has cleared FSD Supervised for use on public roads, with Tesla’s European division announcing the approval on X and noting that a formal rollout would begin soon. The announcement was reshared by CEO Elon Musk and by Slovenia’s Energy and Infrastructure Minister, Jernej Vrtovec, who called it a step toward “developing Slovenia.”
The approval matters beyond Slovenia’s borders because of how Europe’s regulatory system works. The Netherlands became the first EU country to grant FSD provisional type approval back in April, after its vehicle authority, the RDW, completed an extended technical assessment. Because that approval flows through an EU-wide framework, other member states can adopt it directly rather than repeating the same testing process from scratch. Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Belgium each did exactly that through May and June, and Slovenia’s approval, arriving after a roughly two-month pause in new markets, makes it the sixth country to sign on. Tesla owners can now legally use FSD Supervised continuously while driving across all six countries without needing to switch the system off at national borders.
There’s a bigger vote on the horizon that gives this latest approval extra weight. Tesla has said an EU-wide type approval vote could happen as soon as October 6, which would need a qualified majority of at least 15 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population to pass. If it succeeds, FSD would gain blanket approval across the EU in one motion rather than country by country, although actual vehicle regulations would still need a separate legislative update expected to take roughly two years. France has already begun on-road testing of two FSD-equipped vehicles after raising safety concerns earlier this summer, while Finland and Greece have said they’re weighing their own national approvals. Italy hasn’t approved the system yet either, though some observers expect Slovenia’s green light could put pressure on its southern neighbor to move faster, given the similar mountainous terrain the two countries share along parts of their border region.
That terrain is exactly what’s drawing attention to the footage now spreading from Slovenia. Clips show a Tesla running FSD Supervised on narrow, winding mountain roads, navigating tight switchbacks and blind curves where visibility is limited and the margin for error is thin. In Europe, it’s worth remembering that FSD is legally classified as a Level 2 driver assistance system, not full automation. That means the car can steer, accelerate and brake on its own, but the person behind the wheel remains legally responsible for the vehicle at all times and is required to keep watching the road throughout. What the mountain footage demonstrates isn’t autonomous driving in the sense of a driverless car, but rather how confidently the current software handles genuinely difficult road geometry while a human stays ready to intervene.
The version running in most Tesla vehicles right now is FSD V14, which Tesla has steadily refined through a series of point updates over the past several months. The V14.3 release in April brought a 20 percent improvement in reaction time, according to Tesla’s own release documentation, and a subsequent V14.3.9 update introduced a feature called Automatic Collision Evasion, which lets the system intervene even during manual driving to swerve around sudden obstacles in the road. Later updates in this cycle upgraded the reinforcement learning stage of the neural network’s training and rewrote the underlying AI compiler using MLIR, a move Tesla says further sped up reaction times and improved how quickly new models can be trained and deployed. Behavior refinements have also crept in steadily, including better handling of complex intersections with multiple traffic lights, improved recognition of emergency vehicles and school buses, and smoother, less hesitant lane selection in ordinary driving.
The bigger jump is coming with FSD V15, which Tesla’s AI leadership has described as an architectural shift rather than an incremental update, comparable in scale to the leap from V13 to V14. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s AI chief, said the next version will bring even earlier hazard prediction, faster reaction times, and meaningfully better collision avoidance overall. Musk has confirmed that V15 will scale up to roughly 10 billion parameters, a tenfold increase over the current generation’s model size, aimed at letting the system process substantially more information about its surroundings at once. According to a JPMorgan research note following meetings with Tesla’s investor relations team, V15 includes improvements across seven distinct technology areas, and Tesla has said roughly 40 percent of those changes are already being tested inside its robotaxi fleet. Elluswamy told investors during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call that the robotaxi service was already running a version of V15 with seven major improvements over V14.
Hardware access will differ depending on what’s already installed in a given vehicle. Tesla has confirmed that V15 will run natively on current Hardware 4 systems through model distillation, meaning existing HW4 owners won’t need new computer hardware to receive it. Owners running older Hardware 3 systems, however, will continue receiving updates within the V14 series rather than jumping to V15, since accessing the newer architecture will require a hardware upgrade. Tesla has indicated that V15 is being validated as a prerequisite for what it calls “Unsupervised FSD,” the fully driverless tier the company needs before expanding its commercial Robotaxi service more broadly, with consumer rollout of V15 itself expected sometime in late 2026 or early 2027.
For now, Slovenian Tesla owners are waiting on the official rollout Tesla promised in its approval announcement, joining a small but growing list of European drivers legally using FSD Supervised on some of the continent’s most demanding roads, months before the software’s next major leap even arrives.
