An amendment to Korea’s Motor Vehicle Management Act will govern how retired EV batteries get turned into remanufactured ones — but Act No. 21412, promulgated February 27, 2026, is not in force yet. It takes effect July 1, 2027, still nearly a year off as of this writing. In What to Check When Planning a Second-Life Battery Business in Korea, ARC Current noted that when a battery’s path leads back to its original use — remanufacturing — neither KC 62619 nor KC 10031 applies, and left the actual remanufacturing path for a later piece. This is that piece. Because it deals with a law that hasn’t taken effect, this piece draws a hard line, sentence by sentence, between what the amendment settles now and what it hands off to lower-level rules still to be written.

A different track from reuse

KC 10031 (the reused-cell safety inspection) and KC 62619 both sit under the Electrical Appliances and Consumer Products Safety Control Act, administered by the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (an arm of Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, or MOTIE). Both explicitly exclude batteries reused in an EV drive system from their scope. Remanufacturing means restoring a retired battery — through component replacement and repair — back into an EV’s drive battery, so by definition it falls outside the electrical-appliance framework and into the law that governs the vehicle itself. This Motor Vehicle Management Act amendment fills that gap.

The entire track sits with Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT). Performance grading, agency designation, business registration, safety inspection, and history-tracking are all newly assigned to MOLIT’s minister. MOTIE appears only as a party MOLIT must consult when setting grading criteria — it holds no separate approval authority here. Which ministry actually regulates a given battery, in other words, depends on which grade it lands in.

Pre-removal performance grading

Under newly added Article 35-13, an EV owner (or a licensed dismantling/recycling operator handling deregistration on the owner’s behalf) must have a retired battery graded by MOLIT before removing it from the vehicle. Four exceptions shift the timing and the party responsible: batteries recalled for a manufacturing defect, batteries recovered under free repair, batteries no longer usable after an accident, and batteries an owner has swapped out — in each of these, the manufacturer, insurer, or owner respectively may have the battery graded after removal instead.

MOLIT’s minister must sort graded batteries into three tiers — remanufacturing, reuse, or recycling — based on criteria set in consultation with MOTIE and the Ministry of Environment. Those criteria haven’t been finalized yet. A companion article, 35-14, lets MOLIT designate the Korea Transportation Safety Authority (TS) as the grading agency, but the facility and equipment standards for that designation, and the designation procedure itself, are both left to a MOLIT ministerial ordinance not yet written. A related provision, Article 35-18, lets MOLIT build and operate a history-tracking system covering battery production, grading results, and remanufactured-battery installation — but this, too, is framed as something MOLIT “may” do, with the operating method still unspecified.

Component-manufacturer registration

Anyone looking to remanufacture retired batteries into EV drive batteries must register as a “remanufactured battery business” under new Article 35-15 — not through a brand-new registration system, but by folding into the Act’s existing component-manufacturer registration track (Article 30-2, paragraph 2). Beyond registering, a remanufactured battery business must run its own safety-verification test before selling or leasing a product, confirming it meets standards MOLIT has yet to set by ordinance, and hand those results to whoever performs the pre-distribution safety inspection. The standard self-certification process that applies to ordinary auto parts (Article 30, paragraph 1, and others) is explicitly switched off here — this runs on its own track. The substantive content of that safety-verification test, though, is still pending a MOLIT ordinance.

Pre-distribution safety inspection

New Article 35-16 requires a MOLIT-administered “pre-distribution safety inspection” before a remanufactured battery reaches the road — for a manufacturer selling a vehicle with a remanufactured battery installed, or an owner who has swapped their drive battery for a remanufactured one. A vehicle that fails this inspection can’t be sold or driven. MOLIT may delegate the inspection to a performance-test agency, and whoever conducts it must check the safety-verification results the business already produced. Owners of vehicles running remanufactured batteries also face a periodic safety inspection afterward — though passing a regular vehicle inspection satisfies this requirement too. As with the earlier provisions, the specific standards, methods, and procedures for both the pre-distribution and periodic inspections are left to a MOLIT ordinance that hasn’t been issued.

What’s still open

A long list of items remains to be filled in by ministerial ordinance before the 2027 enforcement date: the concrete standards and procedure for performance grading; the detailed criteria splitting batteries into remanufacturing, reuse, and recycling tiers (a MOLIT-MOTIE-Environment Ministry matter); facility and equipment standards plus the designation procedure for grading agencies; the substance of the remanufactured-battery safety-verification test; standards, methods, and procedures for both the pre-distribution and periodic safety inspections; facility and equipment standards for storing and transporting retired batteries; and how the history-tracking system will actually operate.

One more thing isn’t resolved by this amendment alone. A separate law — the Act on the Management and Industrial Promotion of Retired Batteries, taking effect May 27, 2027 — will require distribution, remanufacturing, reuse, and recycling operators alike to register with MOTIE’s minister. Whether that law’s remanufacturing-business registration duplicates the Motor Vehicle Management Act’s component-manufacturer registration, or one substitutes for the other, isn’t something this amendment’s text settles.

ARC’s take

The amendment draws a clear line: remanufacturing now sits in its own regulatory track, separate from reuse, and that track runs consistently through MOLIT from grading to registration to inspection. But most of what a business would actually have to satisfy — the grading criteria, the safety-verification standard, the inspection procedures — is still sitting in ordinances yet to be written. How those get filled in over the next year will do more to determine whether entering the remanufacturing business is practical than the framework set out here.

Related: KC 10031: How Korea Actually Inspects Repurposed Batteries, KC 62619 Explained: Scope, Procedure, and Where It Strains Against Used Batteries

Source: [Korea Law Information Center] Motor Vehicle Management Act amendment summary (Act No. 21412, promulgated 2026.2.27, effective 2027.7.1) (https://law.go.kr/LSW/lsRvsRsnListP.do?lsId=001747&chrClsCd=010102&lsRvsGubun=all)

Source: [Korea Insurance Research Institute, Weekly Trend (2025.9.15)] Motor Vehicle Management Act partial amendment bill (Bill No. 12740, sponsored by Rep. Song Gi-heon and 10 others), full old-new article text reproduced (https://kiri.or.kr/PDF/weeklytrend/20250915/trend20250915_19.pdf)