On 5 November China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology opened public consultation on a draft regulation for digital identity management of electric vehicle power batteries. Comments close on 6 December.
The draft runs to 20 articles. It establishes a 24-digit national standard code as the single index linking information across design, production, sales, vehicle installation, repair, dismantling, recycling and comprehensive utilisation, creating a digital identity file for each pack.
MIIT will manage the system and share data with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Commerce and the State Administration for Market Regulation, building the data architecture on the principles of minimum necessity, segmented collection and data reuse.
Two obligations for carmakers
Vehicle manufacturers carry two mandatory duties. They must upload the battery pack code of the vehicles they produce through the motor vehicle certificate management system, and they must provide owners, through the in-car system or an app, with the battery code, the manufacturer’s name and address, the production date, rated energy, warranty period and the type of cathode material.
The draft also encourages monitoring the condition of batteries in service.
Recycling joins the same system
Battery makers, carmakers, battery-swap operators, repair businesses, end-of-life dismantlers and comprehensive utilisation companies must all report information to the national traceability platform. Dismantling and utilisation companies are to work from the product category, composition and dismantling manual retrieved via the digital identity code.
The draft encourages reporting the share of recycled raw material used and the results of carbon footprint accounting.
The deadline is being set by the scrap pile
China’s end-of-life power battery volume is projected to exceed one million tonnes in 2030. A six-ministry interim measure published in January this year already called for the establishment of this system, and the consultation draft moves it to the operational level.
The clause with the widest commercial reach concerns exports. Companies selling abroad will in future have to satisfy both the domestic coding system and the EU battery passport, which means two data regimes on the same physical pack, for the same customer, with no shared registry between them.
Violations including incomplete information and falsified data are to be penalised under the interim measures. The regulation is due to take effect in 2027, with the exact date still to be set.
For suppliers, the practical burden is data plumbing rather than hardware. A code that must survive from cathode chemistry to dismantling manual is a data architecture problem, and the companies that can populate it once and report it twice will carry a structural cost advantage over those that cannot.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://auto.gasgoo.com/news/202611/6I70477153C501.shtml.