Thatcham Research, the UK’s only automotive risk intelligence body, has published its New Electric Vehicle Blueprint, calling on automakers to redesign EVs so that battery packs, charge ports, and high-voltage systems can be repaired rather than written off after minor accidents. A Thatcham survey conducted with the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) found that battery-related issues are the primary concern for roughly 45% of insurers and 42% of repair professionals. Paul Myles reported the blueprint’s details for WardsAuto in April 2026, drawing on an interview with Dan Harrowell, a principal engineer at Thatcham Research. The core problem is well-documented but rarely quantified this sharply: a battery pack represents about 40% of an EV’s total value, so a moderate collision that damages the pack can push a car into write-off territory that would be a straightforward repair on a conventional vehicle.

Battery Design Is the Root Cause of the Write-Off Problem

Most EV manufacturers build structural battery packs integrated into the chassis and protected by a welded safety basket — a design that saves weight but makes the pack nearly impossible to service without disassembling the entire underbody. Harrowell put it plainly: “Most EVs have a battery slung under the vehicle, so you can remove the battery, and hence, that’s why it’s vulnerable.” The trend is moving in the wrong direction. As automakers chase lighter vehicles through tighter integration, packs are increasingly glued and welded in place. “The more and more throwaway they’ve become, because you can’t even remove parts of them,” Harrowell said. Our own battery degradation coverage has shown that how an EV is charged affects long-term health more than most buyers realize — but none of that matters if a fender-bender renders the pack unserviceable before degradation even becomes a factor.

Thatcham’s blueprint sets out eight specific design requirements. Battery packs must use removable fasteners rather than permanent adhesives. Casings and mounting brackets must be accessible without full disassembly. Pyrotechnic circuit breakers should be designed for easy reset or replacement rather than full component swap. Charge ports should be positioned in less vulnerable locations as standalone units. High-voltage diagnostic procedures should be standardized so independent repair shops can work on EVs without expensive proprietary tooling. The organization also wants resettable emergency safety loops, the electric equivalent of a conventional fuel cut-off switch.

The EU Battery Passport Gives Thatcham a Regulatory Hook

Harrowell pointed to the European Union’s Battery Passport regulations as an existing framework that already requires serviceability assessments, and serviceability, in his view, is the first step toward full repairability. “If we can service them, that’s great for recycling, it’s great for repair, it’s great for remanufacture,” he said. Volvo was the first automaker to launch an EV battery passport ahead of the EU mandate, covering the EX90. That kind of upstream transparency is what Thatcham is asking for industry-wide. The blueprint calls for battery damage assessment tools available to all stakeholders, including independent repair shops and insurers, not just franchised dealers.

BYD’s Modular Approach Points Toward What Thatcham Wants

Not every automaker is heading in the wrong direction. Harrowell singled out BYD for using a modular system that improves serviceability, and BMW for marketing battery parts with repairability built in, with staff trained accordingly. “So, they’ve got thought process (that) batteries are repairable, and we’ve trained all our staff to repair them,” Harrowell said of BMW. Thatcham formalized its position on BYD’s approach by entering a 12-month partnership with BYD beginning January 1, 2026, to embed repair-friendly design early in development for the brand’s expanding UK lineup. The numbers make the business case plain: repair-related costs made up 64% of UK motor insurance claims in Q3 2025, totaling £1.9 billion.

China has already shown it can impose design mandates quickly when it chooses to. The country’s “no fire” battery mandate effectively validates LFP chemistry and BYD’s cell-to-body architecture, demonstrating that state-level design requirements can reshape how packs are engineered. China also recently banned concealed door handles on safety grounds, forcing design changes at Tesla, BMW, and Xiaomi. The UK and EU are unlikely to move with that speed on repairability, but the direction of travel is the same.

Industry Analysts Say Global Alignment Is the Hard Part

Adam Ragozzino, Omdia’s principal analyst for batteries and electric powertrains, told WardsAuto that bringing EVs to parity with internal combustion vehicles on service and insurance costs is not enough on its own to accelerate consumer adoption. “Automakers need to design cars with the repairs that come later in mind,” he said. He pointed to Stellantis’s 2023 partnership with battery-swap company Ample as one model for making batteries more serviceable throughout a vehicle’s life. Alexandre Parente, head of global analysis and reporting at Jato Dynamics, backed the blueprint’s logic but flagged the execution risk: “For this to work in practice, it will require alignment across the global automotive ecosystem, not just the U.K. or Europe.” China’s domestic market, he noted, prioritizes speed to market and cost competitiveness, and repairability is not a central design consideration there. That matters because Chinese-built EVs are arriving in European markets at pace, as we covered in our analysis of Western automakers ceding structural ground to Chinese rivals. A repairability standard that doesn’t reach Chinese manufacturers at the design stage risks applying only to vehicles that aren’t winning the price war anyway.

EVXL’s Take

This blueprint is overdue. The EV insurance cost problem has been hiding in plain sight for years: an industry that correctly argues EVs have lower running costs has systematically ignored that a single minor accident can generate a five-figure repair bill or a total loss. Thatcham’s data — 40% of vehicle value sitting in a welded-in pack, 45% of insurers citing battery issues as their top concern — puts numbers to what EV owners in the UK have been experiencing as premium shock. Rising UK EV adoption, with EVs now representing roughly one in every 30 used car sales, makes the write-off problem structurally worse as older, lower-value EVs enter the used market where a battery repair bill exceeds the car’s worth by an even wider margin.

I haven’t driven a BYD Dolphin on UK roads, so I can’t speak to whether the modular approach feels meaningfully different from the driver’s seat. What I can say is that after spending time with several EVs where battery preconditioning and charge management are buried three menus deep, it’s not surprising that the physical pack is equally inaccessible to the technician. The design philosophy flows from the top down.

Thatcham’s real leverage is its Vehicle Risk Rating system, which feeds directly into UK insurance group ratings. If the organization follows through and rates poorly designed packs as higher insurance risks, raising premiums on vehicles that can’t be economically repaired, automakers will have a financial reason to listen before the next model cycle. Expect Thatcham to publish its first repairability scores by model by early 2027, and for at least two major manufacturers to announce design changes in response within 18 months of those ratings going live.

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.