We are rapidly approaching an inflection point in the adoption of electric vehicles on the roads. All major automotive companies are having well-funded plans for mass market affordable branded EV product line models, which can open the floodgates. A rapid growth of battery energy density, accompanied by an aggressive progress of reduction of costs of lithium-ion batteries, brings safety concerns. While more energy stored in the battery pack of an EV translates to a longer range, the downside is that accidents will be more violent due to battery inevitable explosion. With today's technology, severe crashes involving intrusion into the battery pack will potentially result in a thermal runaway, fire, and explosion.

Most of research on lithium-ion batteries have been concerned with the electrochemistry of cells. However, in most cases failure and thermal runaway is caused by mechanical loading due to crash events. There is a growing need to summarize the already published results on mechanical loading and response of batteries and offer a critical evaluation of work in progress. The objective of this paper is to present such review with a discussion of many outstanding issues and outline of a roadmap for future research.

我们正在迅速接近在道路上采用电动汽车的拐点。所有主要的汽车公司都在为大众市场上可负担得起的品牌EV产品线模型制定了资金充足的计划，这可以打开闸门。电池能量密度的快速增长，伴随着锂离子电池成本的大幅下降，带来了安全隐患。电动汽车的电池组中存储的更多能量转化为更长的距离，但不利的是，由于电池不可避免的爆炸，事故将更加猛烈。使用当今的技术，涉及撞入电池组的严重碰撞可能会导致热失控，着火和爆炸。

锂离子电池的大多数研究都与电池的电化学有关。但是，在大多数情况下，故障和热失控是由于碰撞事件引起的机械负载引起的。越来越需要总结已经发表的有关电池的机械负载和响应的结果，并对正在进行的工作进行严格的评估。本文的目的是通过许多未决问题的讨论和未来研究路线图的概述来介绍此类评论。