Two Europes in the same day
An ordinary day this July can start like this: I switch on FSD on a stretch of motorway — real in my car, not homologated in Spain, part of my life after the Dutch RDW approval and a tough week on Spanish roads hacking the Tesla — and I arrive at a meeting where the topic isn't the future of mobility. The topic is a meter.
A meter that doesn't arrive. A power upgrade that costs an arm and a leg. A connection file that's been «under process» for months. A threat to cut power over a site connection that should never have dragged on this long. A factory being told that to grow it needs a six-figure grid contribution… or to wait.
Same morning. Same European Union. Two administrative civilisations.
What Europe does know how to do: regulate what makes headlines
I'm not going to pretend homologating FSD was trivial. It wasn't. There was safety, liability, standards, evidence. The RDW did serious work: kilometres, scenarios, conditions, reports. That deserves respect.
But look at the political energy stirred up by a car that «almost drives itself». Headlines. Debates. Committees. Nervous European manufacturers. Regulators at the centre of the photo. It's the kind of problem Brussels understands: visible, technological, geopolitical, with a narrative.
The meter doesn't make headlines. The meter is prose. It's a technician, a cable, a transformer, a certificate, a permit, a scheduling slot, a portal that crashes, an email with no reply. The meter doesn't appear in the photo of European innovation. And that's why it rots.
What Europe doesn't know how to do: boring physics
I've spent years documenting cases where the grid wasn't the answer — or arrived too late. A home with no power because of someone else's debts. A factory up against an obscene reinforcement quote. A family under threat of disconnection with a provisional contract. In every one of them, the solution arrived before the electricity administration did: batteries, hybrids, peak shaving, partial autonomy.
Not because we're magicians. Because the bottleneck wasn't the silicon in the panels: it was the paperwork of the meter.
Europe talks about the energy transition, electrification, heat pumps, electric cars, green industry. All of that demands one utterly boring thing: that the grid and its operators work on a human timescale. Without that, the transition is a PowerPoint slide.
The self-driving car and the meter: the same disease
European bureaucracy isn't just slow. It's selective.
It speeds up — in its own way — when the issue is reputational and competitive against the US or China. It grinds to a halt when the issue is the mundane maintenance of the state: connections, permits, counters, banks that don't integrate, endless cookie banners, impossible appointment slots. I already wrote about that wear and tear: the kind that drains your health in teaspoons and then wonders why the continent is losing vitality, in cookies and banks.
FSD took years to get in. Scandalous, yes. But at least there was a path, an agency, a file someone pushed all the way through. My industrial client's meter, by contrast, has no narrative. There's no «historic approval». There's only waiting. And waiting, for a small business, is loss: of production, of margin, of people.
Prioritising what's sexy is a political decision
When a continent regulates the car's software with fervour and tolerates the operational collapse of the basics, it's saying what kind of modernity it wants to project.
It wants to project the future. It wants to project control. It wants to project that it leads on the ethics of AI and autonomy. Meanwhile, the citizen electrifies their home and discovers the bottleneck isn't ethics: it's a grid operator who doesn't answer.
I'm not asking for less safety in the car. I'm asking for the same operational seriousness for the meter. Real maximum deadlines. Named people responsible. Administrative silence that isn't a strategy. Connections that don't cost a fortune just because «that's how the system works». An electricity market where increasing your power supply isn't a feudal ordeal.
If Europe can demand hundreds of requirements from Tesla, it can demand something simpler from its own grid operators: that they function.
What I do while Europe makes up its mind
While that seriousness arrives — if it arrives — I do what I always do: design so the client depends less on the paperwork.
If the grid doesn't arrive, we go off-grid intelligently. If the grid arrives but punishes peaks, we do peak shaving. If the site connection is an administrative hostage situation, we shield it with hybrid systems and batteries. If the reinforcement quote is a rip-off, we look for the technical architecture that makes it irrelevant.
That's not anti-system. It's survival. It's the same logic that made me value FSD: good technology gives you back sovereignty. It removes your dependence on a human or institutional bottleneck that isn't in a hurry.
The assisted car gives me back attention and energy on the road. A well-designed solar system gives the client independence from a grid operator that doesn't listen. They're two sides of the same idea: don't wait forever for someone who doesn't need you.
The uncomfortable question
What's the point of a continent that homologates the car of the future if it can't plug in the present?
What's the point of talking about reindustrialisation if a factory waits eight months for a power upgrade?
What's the point of electrifying mobility if the charging point depends on a file nobody prioritises because it doesn't make the evening news?
Europe doesn't have a talent problem. It has an attention hierarchy problem. It attends to what shines. It neglects what sustains.
Closing
I'll keep using FSD where appropriate, with discipline, without pretending it is already legal in Spain — because it isn't. And I'll keep installing solutions that reduce dependence on the impossibly slow meter. I don't see a contradiction. I see the same diagnosis twice: Europe celebrates what's sexy and abandons the basics.
Europe has already proven it can regulate the complex when it wants to. Now it has to prove it can operate the simple when it needs to. Because the future isn't measured only in historic approvals. It's measured in whether, on a Tuesday morning, the factory has power, the home has capacity, and the file isn't a black hole.
The self-driving car already has a date on the European calendar. The meter, in too many cases, still doesn't. And that asymmetry — more than any cookie banner — is the exact portrait of a continent staring at its own reflection of the future… while tripping over the cable of the present.