Battery / Energy storage → European Union

How this pathway works in practice

A lithium-ion pack sold into the European Union is not covered by a single certificate. The file that customs and market surveillance actually open is assembled from four separate instruments: cell and pack safety under EN 62133-1/-2, transport classification under UN 38.3, hazardous-substance limits under RoHS 2011/65/EU as amended, and the battery regime that now sits in Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 in place of the old Battery Directive. A radio module inside the same product pulls in the Radio Equipment Directive and its own safety and EMC articles, so the pack report and the radio report have to agree on the same product description.

Two things decide the schedule far more than test lab capacity:

• Whether a UN 38.3 test summary already exists for the exact cell. Without that summary air freight stops at the forwarder, and no amount of CE paperwork fixes it.
• Who is the manufacturer and who is the importer of record. The EU authorised representative and the declaration of conformity sit with one of those two parties, and surveillance authorities ask for the name on the label first.

We test cells and packs to the same revision of the standard so that the pack report is never rejected for citing a superseded cell report.

Each mandatory item above is mapped to a test standard inside our accredited scope, then tested on the smallest sample that still covers every variant you intend to ship, so the importer of record can hand the file straight to the European Union assessment route without a second round of questions. The 6–8 weeks lead time counts from the day production-representative samples arrive, not from the day the quotation is signed, and the 4 key documents listed above are the ones most often requested at the border or at listing review.