Volvo’s battery passport: material traceability, data standards and testing

A passport attached to an individual vehicle

Volvo Cars introduced a battery passport for its flagship EX90 electric SUV in June 2024, ahead of the European Union’s scheduled passport requirement. The automaker described the launch as a world first. Volvo was owned by China’s Geely. Volvo and the British supply-chain technology company Circulor had spent more than five years developing the system. Manufacturing preparation included tracing components through production so that their origins could be connected to individual vehicles.

Circulor chief executive Douglas Johnson-Poensgen put the cost at about $10 per car and said battery-health information would remain current for 15 years. Those figures were his estimates. New suppliers would need auditing to keep the information current. The system also checked suppliers’ monthly energy bills and renewable-energy shares when calculating the battery footprint. Volvo sustainability head Vanessa Butani linked the early introduction to transparency for buyers. Owners would receive a simplified view, while regulators would receive more complete information. Production was due to begin in Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States, with deliveries planned for the second half of 2024.

What the owner could inspect

EX90 drivers could reach the passport through the Volvo Cars app or a QR code on the door frame. Circulor’s launch description divided the information into material traceability, embedded carbon footprint and recycled content. Material information covered the origins and production journeys of cobalt, nickel, graphite and lithium. The carbon entry concerned the battery pack, while the recycled-content entry expressed the share of recycled material used in the battery.

Circulor described these records as primary supply-chain data attributed to individual cars. Its partnership with Volvo dated from 2019. The customer interface therefore connected a particular vehicle to information collected upstream, rather than presenting only a general explanation of battery chemistry. The three information groups answered different questions: where materials travelled, what emissions were associated with the pack, and how much recycled material it contained. Circulor promoted the implementation as production-scale transparency. That description is a supplier claim; its launch statement did not independently establish universal coverage of every supplier or certify every record against the later European requirements.

A distributed information system

Manufacturers and importers faced questions about storage, access and continued availability as well as the contents of a passport. Fraunhofer IPK’s April 2024 technical work assigned data responsibility across a distributed system. Manufacturers would manage their records, while some functions, including registration and an aggregated portal, were envisaged centrally. Different information would be available to authorities and other users, requiring interfaces and access controls within the software.

Thomas Knothe, a scientist at Fraunhofer IPK, identified interoperability as a central implementation challenge. Data carriers, unique identifiers, national rules and different management platforms all needed to work together. The Battery Pass consortium used a software demonstrator to explore those connections. Its project ran from April 2022 to March 2025 with €8.2 million of federal funding from Germany. Partners included Audi, BASF, BMW, Circulor, FIWARE, Systemiq, TWAICE, Umicore and VDE Renewables. The demonstrator and technical reference work were preparation tools. Their existence did not establish that a commercial vehicle passport already implemented every interface, backup arrangement or access function being considered by the consortium.

Identifiers, routing and incomplete operating data

Battery Pass’s March 2024 technical guidance distinguished a passport from the upstream tracing systems that supply its information. Material collection and processing happen before a finished battery enters the market. The passport receives selected data from those earlier systems. Verification could include supplier credentials, audits and material-balance checks. Distributed-ledger technology was an optional tracing mechanism in this general architecture.

Existing identification schemes needed to coexist without duplicate identifiers or collisions. Routing also needed to follow the current responsible operator when ownership of the information changed or a company ceased operating. The guidance favoured federated exchange with translation between data models and minimum interface functions. Dynamic operating information introduced further problems: a battery might lack internet connectivity, an owner might decline data sharing, or ownership records might be unavailable. Temporary outages could be handled through later synchronisation, but interpolation of missing data remained approximate. These were technical recommendations and unresolved questions in March 2024, rather than proof that every deployed passport had solved them.

Testing sustainability information across supply chains

The Global Battery Alliance launched a second passport-piloting wave on 20 June 2024. Eleven consortia brought together cell manufacturers and tracing providers. Participating manufacturers included CATL, EVE Energy, Farasis Energy, FinDreams Battery, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, Sunwoda and CALB. The alliance put their combined share of the global electric-vehicle battery market above 80%. Seven tracing providers participated, including Circulor, Circularise, Glassdome and RCS Global.

The pilots extended the earlier proof of concept beyond carbon-footprint information and human-rights and child-labour indices. Additional rulebooks addressed forced labour, Indigenous peoples’ rights, biodiversity and circular design. Participants would report against seven sustainability rulebooks, with differentiated environmental, social and governance scores intended to support comparison. Data assurance was also part of the expanded exercise. The alliance’s objective was a comparable product-level sustainability framework drawing on both regulations and voluntary standards. This was a collaborative pilot programme with its own reporting and scoring ambitions. Joining a consortium did not itself establish that a battery met all European market requirements or that every sustainability entry had received independent verification.

What the completed pilots exposed

Ten consortia completed the 2024 exercise, according to the Global Battery Alliance’s April 2025 assessment. Five consortia used elements of data verification conducted by three independent third-party verifiers. Reporting covered supply chains for aluminium, cobalt, copper, artificial graphite, iron phosphate, lithium and nickel. The exercise gathered, scored and aggregated real sustainability information.

Partial supplier coverage complicated aggregation. Score weightings, material weights and missing reports affected comparability, while differing interpretations of greenhouse-gas rules required clarification. Disclosure also remained voluntary: the pilot imposed no minimum disclosure level. Some participants hesitated to share information when the recipients and sharing arrangements were unclear. The alliance proposed a more concrete framework for data sharing and further verification protocols. It also favoured companies retaining custody of their own supply-chain data to avoid dependence on third-party bottlenecks. These findings limited what could be inferred from a completed pilot. Completion demonstrated participation in the exercise; it did not mean every upstream record was complete, equally disclosed or independently assured.

Turning information requirements into attributes

DIN and DKE published practical guidance through DIN DKE SPEC 99100, announced on 15 January 2025. The specification defined attributes for the battery passport, combining requirements from the European Batteries Regulation with voluntary additions. Its information groups included battery and manufacturer details, materials and composition, performance and durability, working conditions in raw-material extraction, and the carbon footprint.

The specification built on the Battery Pass consortium’s content guidance, updated in December 2023. An aligned data-attribute longlist allowed requirements to be filtered by battery category. Companies could therefore identify relevant attributes before implementing collection and exchange arrangements. BASF’s Torsten Freund chaired the specification committee, while acatech president Thomas Weber described the work as clarification for implementing businesses. Systemiq led the eleven-organisation Battery Pass consortium behind the earlier guidance. The specification was available without charge. Mandatory regulatory information and voluntary additions nevertheless remained different categories within the same implementation resource. A company using the specification still needed to establish which attributes applied to its battery and how its own systems would collect, maintain and make them available.

Potential value and the limits of modelling

Battery Pass’s April 2024 value assessment identified twelve passport use cases and quantified three: residual-value assessment, recycling efficiency and end-of-life collection. The consortium estimated potential reductions of roughly 2–10% in procurement costs, including technical testing, for independent operators. It also estimated reductions of 10–20% in recycling pre-processing and treatment costs through lower sampling needs, alongside possible recycling-rate improvements of approximately 1–2%.

Extended battery service life could save an estimated 370–1,300 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide annually in the European Union under the assessment’s assumptions. Incorporating passport information into vehicle deregistration and export procedures was another proposed intervention. Consumers could benefit from information when purchasing or selling batteries, provided the information was communicated effectively. Consortium lead Tilmann Vahle identified implementation challenges, particularly for smaller businesses, and called for support. The estimates used qualitative assumptions and generic economic calculations for non-representative technologies. They were modelled benefits, not measured Volvo savings. Implementation costs and changing processes remained relevant.

Production data has a separate economic role

Fraunhofer FFB and Accenture examined digitalisation within battery-cell manufacturing in research presented in April 2024. They surveyed 143 battery and digitalisation experts, mainly from companies in Europe and North America, in two stages. Experts first identified useful applications and then assessed them within a model factory with annual capacity of 40 gigawatt-hours. Potential annual savings reached €27 million, with emissions reductions approaching 10%.

Predictive quality and traceability applications could reduce scrap rates by up to 10.3% relative to conventional production methods. Digital tracking and optimisation could lower energy consumption by up to 9.5%, while predictive maintenance could reduce machine downtime by up to 7.1%. Materials accounted for more than two-thirds of cell-production costs, making waste reduction particularly significant in the model. Electrode production was a prominent area of opportunity because it consumed much of the material. These estimates concerned several digital manufacturing applications. They were not an assessment of passport software alone. Jonathan Krauß identified technology selection and investment timing as challenges, while Accenture’s Philipp Wunderlich noted gaps even in basic data collection and real-time analysis.

Fields do not all follow the same timetable

The European Commission’s August 2026 data-point guidance distinguished electric-vehicle batteries, light-means-of-transport batteries and industrial batteries above two kilowatt-hours. The industrial capacity threshold did not define a blanket exemption for smaller electric-vehicle batteries. Its 71-point table classified entries as mandatory, optional, conditional or not required for display at the February 2027 introduction.

Identity, manufacturer, category, model or batch, manufacturing location and date, weight, capacity and chemistry were among the mandatory entries. Carbon-footprint declarations and labels awaited the relevant format provisions. Recovered-material shares followed their own regulatory application arrangements, and the due-diligence entry referred to August 2027. Detailed composition, dismantling information, safety measures and dynamic performance data had separate classifications. This dated guidance supplied an implementation view of the different fields, with different application dates. It expressly did not create additional legal rights or obligations and was not an authoritative statement of the Commission’s position. Its timetable also differed from the simpler descriptions used when early commercial passports were announced in 2024.

Testing the interactions around a passport

BatteryPass-Ready published technical user stories on 30 June 2026 to translate requirements into process flows. The flows identified participating actors, ordered steps and interactions between systems. They located the points at which identifiers, access rights, application programming interfaces and authentication became relevant. The work covered more than the contents of a data record.

• Registering a battery and placing it on the market.
• Accessing public information and controlled passport data.
• Maintaining and updating information throughout the passport lifecycle.
• Searching for existing passports.
• Managing repair, recycling and other end-of-life events.

Failure scenarios were a particular focus. Test preconditions established consistent starting conditions, while expected results supplied measurable criteria for system behaviour. The user stories formed the analytical foundation for the project’s test environment. A process could therefore be examined at its interaction points, including where it might break down, beyond field presence. These resources supported practical preparation and validation of passport systems; the publication did not describe them as automatic certification of every implementation using them.

Maintaining the data model as implementation develops

BatteryPass-Ready released version 2.0 of its data-attribute longlist on 27 August 2026. It built on DIN DKE SPEC 99100 and the previous longlist version 1.3 from March 2026. The update considered final CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 standards published in June, the European registry implementing act and version 2.0 of the Commission’s category-specific data guidance.

Draft measures on restricted-data access and recycled-content calculation were also inputs, alongside partner feedback. Those drafts had a different status from the final standards. An integrated change log recorded revisions from the March release. A new technical-references tab mapped data-model specifications to the longlist. The aligned data model provided the foundation for the schema used to validate passport information in the project’s test environment. Both resources were expected to receive further updates as implementation developed. Attribute selection, model mapping and validation consequently depended on an identifiable version of the resources. The August release established which inputs informed that version; it did not turn every draft policy input into an enacted requirement or demonstrate that every commercial passport already matched the revised schema.