The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced on 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.
The agency’s safety ratings program now includes four new pass-fail tests. These tests check a car’s automatic emergency braking for pedestrians, blind-spot warning, blind-spot intervention, and lane assist—a feature that helps keep the vehicle centered in its lane.
These updated criteria aim to keep up with increasingly advanced vehicles and the many features carmakers advertise to buyers. Automakers often give these features brand names that don’t always clearly explain what they do, and there hasn’t always been a government standard to measure how well they perform. The new benchmark rating applies to 2026 Tesla Model Y vehicles built on or after November 12, 2025.
These tests are part of NHTSA’s New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which manages the government’s 5-Star safety rating program. NCAP also conducts a series of tests to see how vehicles perform in frontal and side crashes, as well as their resistance to rollovers and their ability to avoid crashes. The four advanced driver assistance criteria were added in 2024 as part of an update to NCAP to include these advanced features.
