ANSI Flags Three New EV Standards Gaps as Adoption Scales

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has identified three new standardization gaps that U.S. industry must close as electric vehicles move toward mass adoption, adding them to a working list that already tracks 30 previously identified gaps.

The new report, issued by the ANSI Electric Vehicles Standards Panel (EVSP), proposes gaps in three specific areas: damaged EV battery triage, monitoring, storage and transfer; accessible and inclusive EV charging equipment and interfaces; and the user experience, operations and serviceability of public, unattended Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE).

For the supply chain, the first gap carries the most immediate operational weight. Damaged lithium-ion battery packs — whether from crashes, recalls or warehouse incidents — currently move through a patchwork of handling practices, and standardization of triage, storage and transfer protocols directly affects carriers, 3PLs and insurers who handle these shipments. The other two gaps target the charging side of the equation, where reliability and accessibility at public chargers remain persistent friction points for fleet operators and drivers alike.

What does the report actually change?

The document updates progress on standards, research and conformity assessment activities measured against 30 previously identified gaps. It functions as a checkpoint rather than a rulemaking: ANSI coordinates voluntary consensus standards across developers, federal agencies and industry, and the EVSP report tells those participants where work remains unfinished.

Christine Bernat, ANSI's director of standards facilitation, framed the shift in focus in the report's release. "As EV adoption grows, the standards questions are shifting from whether the technology works to how it performs in the real world, for every driver and at every charger," she said. "Damaged batteries, accessibility, and charger reliability are the kinds of issues that are easier to solve together and early, and we encourage more stakeholders to join ANSI in this work."

That framing matters commercially. Early, coordinated standards work tends to reduce downstream compliance costs for manufacturers, carriers and infrastructure operators — and reduces the liability exposure that comes with unstandardized handling of hazardous materials such as damaged battery packs.

Where did the gap list come from?

The report builds on the EVSP's 2023 Roadmap of Standards and Codes for Electric Vehicles at Scale, developed with input from more than 130 organizations spanning federal agencies, national laboratories, standards developers, industry and academia. That roadmap identified 37 standardization gaps across four domains: vehicle systems, charging infrastructure, grid integration and cybersecurity.

ANSI designed the roadmap as a living document, updated as standards work advances, rather than a static publication. That structure allows the panel to add emerging gaps — like the three proposed in this report — without waiting for a full revision cycle.

What happens next?

The EVSP will undertake its next full roadmap in May 2027, giving stakeholders roughly two and a half years to close the newly proposed gaps before the baseline resets. In the interim, ANSI is inviting broader participation from logistics operators, battery handlers and charging-network providers whose day-to-day exposure to damaged packs and unreliable chargers gives them practical input the standards process needs.

For shippers and carriers moving EVs and their batteries, the trajectory points toward codified handling protocols for damaged packs — and toward a charging network built to consistent, verifiable standards that fleets can plan around.