The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Tuesday that the late 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 evaluation program, evaluating 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 its 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 to have passed the ADAS assessment and fails during the confirmatory tests, the agency will remove the recognition that it has these capabilities.
NHTSA will begin conducting its own evaluations of certain ADAS features using contract testing labs for 2027 model year vehicles, the agency told TechCrunch.
The updated criteria are intended to cover ever-evolving vehicles and the long list of consumer-facing features. Automakers typically label these features with names that don’t always describe what tasks they perform, and there’s often no government-provided benchmark to evaluate their performance.
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 carries out a series of tests to determine how vehicles handle frontal and side collisions, as well as rollover resistance and crash avoidance. The four advanced driver assistance criteria were added in 2024 as part of a update to NCAP to include advanced driver assistance functions.
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TechCrunch has reached out to NHTSA to find out what other vehicles are in the queue. We will update the article if the agency responds.
Update: The article has been updated to include information that Tesla conducted these tests.
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