Ms. Barbara Hennessey from NHTSA’s Office of Vehicle Crashworthiness Research provided a presentation on their battery safety research program. Topics included the development of:

• A high level FMEA for current and near term electric vehicles and hybrids to guide the development of other safety assessment projects;
• Test procedures to assess battery stability under normal and abnormal use conditions;
• Test procedures to assess minimum control system requirements including active, passive and redundant control mechanisms, diagnostics, predictive thresholds and operator indicators and messages;
• Field discharge procedures for inoperative/post-crash vehicles.

In response to questions from the audience, NHTSA indicated that ECE-R100 will be considered in developing test procedures, and that the results of the FMEA should be available for discussion at the next EVS meeting in the fall.