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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Tuesday that the later release 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first vehicle to meet the agency’s new benchmark for advanced driver assistance systems.
Four pass-fail tests were added to the agency’s safety ratings program, assessing a car’s automatic emergency braking for pedestrians, blind-spot warning, blind-spot intervention, and lane assist, a feature that helps keep the vehicle in the lane.
Tesla conducted its own tests and submitted the results to NHTSA, an option for manufacturers this year. The agency will confirm these findings. If a company claims it has passed the ADAS assessment and fails during confirmatory tests, the agency will remove its recognition of having those capabilities.
NHTSA will begin conducting its own assessments of certain ADAS features using contracted test labs for model year 2027 vehicles, the agency told TechCrunch.
The updated criteria are meant to catch up to ever-advancing vehicles and the long list of features pitched to consumers. Automakers typically brand these features with names that don’t always describe which tasks they perform, and there’s often no government-provided benchmark to assesses how they perform.
The new benchmark rating applies to 2026 Tesla Model Y vehicles assembled on or after November 12, 2025.
The tests are part of NHTSA’s New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which runs the government’s 5-Star safety rating program. NCAP also conducts a battery of tests to determine how vehicles handle frontal and side crashes as well as rollover resistance, and crash avoidance. The four advanced driver assistance criteria were added in 2024 as part of an update to NCAP to include advanced driver assistance features.
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TechCrunch has reached out to NHTSA to learn what other vehicles are in the queue. We will update the article if the agency responds.
Update: The article was updated to include information that Tesla conducted these tests.
[analyse_source url=”https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/07/tesla-model-y-is-first-car-to-meet-new-u-s-driver-assistance-safety-benchmark/”]