Starting October, EV Battery Safety Norms Are Set to Change. Here's How the Industry Views the Makeover

The Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways recently announced that more stringent battery safety regulations for electric vehicles will take effect from October 1, pushing the industry to prepare for the big change while keeping new challenges in mind. According to the ministry, these amendments include additional safety requirements for battery cells, Battery Management System, on-board chargers, battery pack design, and thermal propagation due to internal cell short circuits leading to fire among others. I think this could be one of the biggest or major challenges for the industry to immediately scale, either on the infrastructure or taking the cycle time to build the battery packs.” He further added that cells are typically purchased in large quantities and if they lack the traceability required by the standard, there is an additional effort required to include that data on the cell, which will also take time. Additionally, he said when it comes to BMS, he said: “It requires particular or specific testing for it to be successful in its performance, and if it is not available with the industry players, it would be a critical bottleneck.” When it comes to wireless communication standards, a near-field communication standard requires RFID, which is not available with more than 90% of the players on the market today, as per Moorthi. They need to be replaced, and markets with dump chargers also need to adapt to these new standard requirements.” “The problem here is that since most of the industry players are not the same as battery and charger manufacturers, there needs to be a lot of understanding between the two to get aligned to the new amendments.