Europe to introduce battery passports for Electric Cars: What you need to know. Electric cars in Europe will require something called a battery passport in only a couple of years’ time. This applies to all electric cars sold in the European Union.
By Laura King
Sam Evans is sharing his views on electric cars developments in Europe.
The European Union will introduce a battery passport for electric cars starting from February of 2027. Now, it’s kind of weird, but here’s what the details actually are. Here’s what’s going to happen: all new electric cars in the European Union will be required to be sold with a battery passport from 2027.
It will provide information about where the materials used to make the power battery came from. Where’s the lithium from? Where’s the cobalt from? Did it come from the Congo, or did it come from somewhere else?
But this system won’t be adopted in other countries. This is just for Europe. From February 2027, the European Union will require all industrial, as in buses, trucks, mining equipment, pretty much anything with electric vehicle batteries with a capacity of more than 2 KW hours to have a passport.
This passport will be linked to the vehicle identification number or the VIN number of the car. When scanned with a QR code reading device, the passport will show information about who produced the battery or handled its materials. Where were the battery materials refined, etc.?
All the way from the mine where they were actually extracted to being connected to the car, putting greater responsibility on manufacturers to have transparent supply chains.
The battery passport will display a battery’s condition and its capacity, allowing future buyers of an electric car to make better-educated decisions about whether the power pack or the battery needs to be replaced in the near future. I mean, that’s not really very likely, to be honest.
I don’t see that being an advantage. I think it sounds like it would just be a bit of a hassle for the manufacturer to put on there the degradation of the battery.
Because you can already see that on your car screen in your car. You can see how many miles of battery’s done in your car. I don’t really see the point of that.
But I do think the idea of having a display showing where the materials are coming from, where they’re mined, where they’re refined, this is information that would be good to know. I mean, it could prevent things like mining of cobalt in African countries essentially for slave labor.
Speaking with UK publication AutoCar, Ellen KY, Chief External Affairs Officer at Circular Switch, one of a handful of companies creating battery passports, said the new technology will not only benefit car owners but also manufacturers.
Not everyone gets to see the same data. Apparently, the automotive manufacturer gets to see everything. The car buyer gets to see the general information, some of the supply chain information, and certainly the state of capacity and the state of battery health.
This data changes depending on the role in either the primary sourcing or the circular economy. Maybe the recycler, for example, really only sees the type of battery it is and how to safely remove it and handle it.
The interesting part about this is that it’s really the first time product-wise that such granular information about upstream activity is getting shared with the end consumer. So that gives them purchasing information and purchasing choice.
Now, if battery manufacturers are required to have some special system that shows different data to the recycling company who recycles the battery pack, different manufacturing data to the actual brand themselves, to the customer, to maybe the government, that will definitely add cost. There’s no question that these kinds of restrictions, these kinds of rules will add cost. So there are pros and cons to this scenario.
The European Union is yet to finalize when specific details will be required on battery passports, though it’s believed that it will begin basically at the start of 2027, meaning just under 3 years from now.
