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It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:

The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.

  • signofzetaEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Does this regulation require user-replaceable batteries, or just batteries users can replace with light tools? Are we talking a return to BlackBerry, or will iPhones without glue suffice? Can Tesla continue to sell cars in Europe, or will it have to be built like the Chevy Bolt with ten bolts and a few coolant lines separating skilled users from a thousand pounds of lithium-ion cells?

    • whoami_whereami@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, many here are celebrating a bit to early because they’ve only read the bullet point in the press release and not the actual regulation.

      Quote:

      A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it. Commercially available tools are considered to be tools available on the market to all end-users without the need for them to provide evidence of any proprietary rights and that can be used with no restriction, except health and safety-related restrictions.

      So no, there’s no requirement that the battery must be easily swappable on the go. In fact there isn’t even the requirement that you must be able to put in a new battery, just that you must be able to remove the old one. “Commercially available tool” might even be a wire cutter to destructively cut the wires that are soldered onto the device’s main board. Because this regulation isn’t actually about consumer rights, it’s about battery recycling. They want people to be able to easily remove the battery at the end of the device’s life so that the battery can be collected separately from the electronics. Nothing more, nothing less.