Up front, no sugar-coating
In Spain, FSD Supervised is not homologated. It isn't. The Dutch RDW approval of 10 April 2026 does not automatically make it legal on Spanish roads. Anyone who says otherwise — or who misreads a headline — is either lying or confusing one country with a continent.
I used it in Spain anyway. Not because a regulator allowed me to. Because I hacked my own Tesla to enable it. That is a fact. This is not a how-to. This is not a recommendation. It is the only way I could measure, on the asphalt I drive every week, a technology that already runs elsewhere while here it remains trapped in bureaucratic limbo.
I wrote in April what I felt after testing it: one of the best experiences of my life behind the wheel. Level 2, responsible driver, eyes forward, hands available. It isn't autonomous magic. It is a brutally competent safety net. That was a test of the system. This is a test of Spain — and of how absurd our regulation has become.
From the hack to real asphalt
One thing is testing FSD in «clean» conditions or on roads where traffic has another grammar. Another is the first real week on Spanish roads: the same sun, the same rush, the same carnival of human decisions any Mediterranean driver recognises in two minutes.
I drive nearly 140,000 km a year. I'm not talking about a Sunday trial. I'm talking about getting home after job sites, clients, jams and calls. That is where you measure whether a technology is a gadget… or a life change. And that is also where you measure the cost of Europe homologating in fits and starts: the Netherlands takes a step; Spain looks the other way; the driver who wants the tool is left between paperwork and cable.
What worked from minute one
The first thing I noticed — again — was the disappearance of that double tension: driving and thinking about work at the same time. With FSD active, a client call stops being an exercise in survival. You stay alert. You remain responsible. But the car processes the environment with a breadth the human brain alone cannot match.
On the motorway, the behaviour is what I already knew: clean lane changes, anticipation of hard braking, speed management that doesn't leave you «asleep» on the typical mediocre Adaptive Cruise float. When the car ahead pulls away, mine pulls away almost instantly. That physics of phantom jams — accumulated human delay — is less noticeable. You feel it in your body: you arrive less wrecked.
It also shows in situations that are everyday in Spain: a lorry drifting slightly into the lane, a car braking to look at an exit, a stretch of roadworks with cones laid out with faith but no geometry. The system doesn't improvise like an annoyed local. It improvises like an engineer: it calculates, yields, advances.
Roundabouts: the Spanish exam
If you want to stress-test an assistance system in Spain, don't send it to a circuit. Send it to a three-lane roundabout where nobody knows which lane is theirs.
In the first week I had everything. Roundabouts where FSD waited with a patience that I, a Mediterranean human, would have turned into a horn blast. Roundabouts where it read yield gestures better than half the newly licensed drivers. And yes: moments when I had to take the wheel because a human did exactly the unpredictable thing — entering without looking, cutting diagonally, stopping in the middle to «get oriented».
That is the truth of Level 2: the system is extraordinary until the environment stops being predictable. In Spain, at a roundabout, it often stops being so. Not because the asphalt is bad. Because the social grammar of traffic here includes improvisation as an acquired right.
Is that a failure of FSD? No. It is a failure of believing a Dutch press release turns Spain into a homologated laboratory. FSD hasn't come to civilise the Spanish driver. It has come to survive them — and to protect you while it does. Even if, for now, you have to come in through the back door.
Roadworks, tolls and the southern mental map
Another exam: endless roadworks. Lanes that appear and disappear. Temporary signs that contradict the GPS. Tolls where human flow has its own rituals.
On several stretches the system hesitated — correctly — and I took control without drama. That is exactly what should happen. The danger isn't that the car asks for help. The danger is the driver who thinks «there's software» means «I can look at my phone».
I don't look at my phone. Never with FSD. Official activation or not: you are still driving. What changes is the quality of that driving. It is the difference between rowing alone in a storm and rowing with a motor that understands the swell.
What nobody tells you: the psychological effect
After an intense week, I felt again what I had already described: driving entirely myself feels incomplete. Not irrational fear. Incompleteness. Like going from a precision tool back to doing it by eye.
That has a good side and a dangerous side.
The good side: it raises your safety bar. You start noticing how clumsy we humans are at processing rear and lateral traffic at once. The dangerous side: you can become arrogant with the system, or addicted to assistance. The discipline is the same as always — eyes, attention, responsibility — only now the technical bar is higher and the moral bar has to rise with it. Especially when you know what you're using still has no permission in your country.
Holland approves. Spain waits. I hack.
There's an irony I like to point out — and this week I lived it in the flesh. Europe takes years to homologate. When one country finally takes a step, the rest of the continent doesn't automatically follow. The Netherlands has a framework. Spain, for now, does not. The software, meanwhile, already knows how to drive the A-7 better than half the licences from ten years ago.
FSD doesn't «solve Spain». Spain is the stress test. And after the first week, my verdict remains the one from April, only sharper and angrier: for anyone doing tens of thousands of kilometres, this isn't a cool extra. It's personal infrastructure. Infrastructure that here they still force you to obtain the ugly way.
It gives you energy back. It changes how you arrive home. It makes you less vulnerable to other people's human error — which is, statistically, what kills you most. And all of that while the official paperwork still says not yet.
Conditions I will not romanticise
It is still Supervised. There are still alerts. There are still stretches where the right move is to disable and drive. In Spain it is still non-homologated use. I will not pretend hacking the car is ideal. It is the symptom of a continent that regulates halfway: it celebrates the headline in Holland and leaves everyone else watching the software from outside.
None of that cancels the technical advance. It cancels the fantasy that «Europe already has it». And I prefer advance without fantasy: a car that on the A-7 lets me reach a meeting with a clear head, and that at a roundabout in Elche forces me to take the wheel when a human decides rules are optional — even if I had to open that capability with digital crowbars.
Close of week 1
Week 1 on Spanish roads did not lower my enthusiasm. It grounded it. And it made me a little angrier at bureaucracy.
FSD works. Spain is real. Spanish homologation, for now, is not. Together they produce an experience that doesn't fit in an RDW press release: brilliant on the motorway, demanding at roundabouts, revealing on roadworks, transformative for end-of-day fatigue — and legally still in no man's land.
If you do few kilometres, it may seem like an expensive toy. If you do what I do, you know the future wasn't a render at a keynote. It was this: a Tuesday in July, heavy traffic, Levant sun, hands available, eyes forward — and a system that could already accompany you in your own country… if paperwork would catch up with asphalt.
I am not writing this so anyone copies the hack. I am writing this so the diagnosis is clear: useful technology should not force you to bypass the regulator in order to exist. It gets homologated, used, improved. And you stop wasting time. Spain, on FSD, is still at step zero.