Does India's EV battery safety rule guarantee no fire?

What the rule actually requires

If you buy an electric scooter in India today, the law does not require its battery pack to survive a single cell catching fire without the whole pack catching fire. It only requires the pack to warn you first.

That is the real content of AIS-156 Amendment 3, the Indian standard for the batteries in electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers and quadricycles. Its Phase 2 clause, mandatory since 31 March 2023 after a wave of scooter fires in 2022, forces a lab to deliberately push one cell inside the pack into thermal runaway. The pack passes if it gives an audio-visual alarm at least five minutes before fire or explosion would occur, not if the fire never happens. Cars, buses and trucks follow a parallel clause under AIS-038 Rev 2.

Why a warning is not a guarantee

This five minute principle is not an Indian invention. It comes from the United Nations' own vehicle regulation, UN R100, written by the WP.29 forum that India is also party to. When R100 added its thermal propagation test in a 2021 revision, Section 6.15 set the same bar: at least five minutes between the warning signal and a hazardous situation, such as fire, explosion or smoke, reaching the passenger compartment. India's AIS tests simply apply that bar locally, through Indian labs, to Indian vehicles.

A five minute window is genuinely useful. It is meant to let a rider feel the scooter get hot, hear the alarm, stop and walk away before anything burns. It is not proof that the pack's chemistry, cell spacing or cooling design can actually stop one cell's failure from spreading to the next.

Where China has pulled ahead

China's own standard, GB 38031, used to mirror this exact five minute idea. Its rewrite, GB 38031-2025, does not. The new rule demands no fire and no explosion for a full two hours after a cell is forced into thermal runaway, keeps a separate five minute limit for any smoke reaching the cabin, and caps the pack's temperature at 60 degrees Celsius through that whole window. It takes effect for new type approvals on 1 July 2026 and for vehicles already approved from 1 July 2027.

This matters in an Indian showroom because so many packs here, in scooters from brands like Ola, TVS, Bajaj and Ather, and in cars like the Tata Nexon EV, MG ZS EV and BYD Atto 3, use cells and pack designs that also feed Chinese or other global platforms. A pack engineered to satisfy GB 38031-2025 is built to a genuinely tougher containment target than Indian law asks for. UN R100 is moving too: WP.29 adopted a 05 series rewrite in March 2025, in force from 26 September 2025, mandatory for new type approvals from 1 September 2027. But its core promise is still the warning, not full containment, and India has not said whether it will adopt that rewrite.

What to actually ask before you buy

Ask for the AIS-156 or AIS-038 Rev 2 test certificate reference and the accredited lab that issued it, not just a dealer's assurance that the vehicle is "ARAI certified". That certificate proves you get a warning. It does not prove the pack cannot catch fire. If a manufacturer says its pack also meets GB 38031-2025 or an equivalent containment test voluntarily, get that claim in writing, since it is a real margin above what India currently demands.

A pack built only to India's minimum is not unsafe. It simply asks you to trust five minutes and your own feet, not the battery, if something ever goes wrong.

Sources

• AIS-156 Amendment 3: battery pack tests for Indian automakers
• GB 38031-2025, "no fire, no explosion"
• UN R100 summary and revision history
• Section 6.15 of UN ECE R100 explained
• Ensuring EV safety: battery certification and India's regulations