Tesla Korea pledges under oath to seek FSD approval for the 79% of Korean Teslas barred from running it

The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement is the reason the ministry never road-tested FSD, according to Tech Times ^[10]. Under the treaty, a US-built car certified to American federal safety standards is deemed to meet Korea's own standards without domestic testing. The manufacturer's assertion of compliance is enough ^[10]. The clause let Model S, Model X and Cybertruck owners switch FSD on without a Korean government sign-off ^[11].

That split leaves 181,853 registered Teslas unable to run the feature, against 47,458 that can ^[17]. The locked-out cars are overwhelmingly Shanghai-built Model 3 and Model Y ^[7]. Those two models make up more than 90 percent of Tesla's Korean sales ^[13]. New sales run above 90 percent China-built while the registered fleet is 79.3 percent locked out, so each further year without certification pushes the locked-out share higher ^[19].

Tech Times describes Tesla Korea as passive on certification while selling a feature it could not legally deploy on the country's most popular Tesla models ^[15]. Every option sold on a Shanghai car added to the owners' eventual claim ^[9] and nothing to a certification file ^[14].

The pledge can go three ways. Certification could arrive for the Shanghai cars, and the owners' claim would narrow to the years they waited. It could stall or fail, and the ministry's existing verdict on the two deployed builds ^[5] would become the plaintiffs' strongest exhibit. Or the ministry could apply that verdict to the treaty cars and cut into the 47,458 that work today ^[6]. I think the second is likeliest in the near term. FSD runs on cameras alone and trains on a global dataset. Tech Times reports that this dataset only partly includes Korean road data because Korea restricts the export of high-precision map data on security grounds ^[16]. The counter-case is that Tesla self-certifies FSD as Level 2 ^[2], below the Level 3 threshold at which Korea requires pre-approval ^[3], so the test Tesla faces may be narrower than the ministry's verdict suggests. A pass for either current build on a Shanghai-built car would prove this view wrong.