The 50-Foot Rule for a Damaged EV Comes From the Manufacturer, Not the Government
The short version. If your electric vehicle has been in a serious crash, the manufacturer's own emergency response guide may say to keep a 50-foot radius clear around it. The National Transportation Safety Board recorded that figure in a 2020 safety report, and immediately noted that keeping to it "may be infeasible at tow or storage yards." The figure is a manufacturer's recommendation, and the NTSB document that records it asks manufacturers to write better guidance rather than placing any duty on whoever is holding your car.
That gap is the story, and it is worth knowing before you accept an answer about where your car is.
What the report actually is
NTSB Safety Report SR-20/01, Safety Risks to Emergency Responders from Lithium-Ion Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles, adopted 13 November 2020.
Read the title. It is a report about emergency responders, written after crashes in which responders faced battery fires. It is not a repair standard, not a storage regulation, and not a consumer document. Everything useful in it for a vehicle owner is a side effect of that focus, which is exactly why it gets misquoted.
Stranded energy, in the report's own words
The hazard has a name.
The energy remaining in a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery, known as stranded energy, poses a risk of electric shock and creates the potential for thermal runaway that can result in battery reignition and fire.
Two things in that sentence matter for a car sitting in a yard. Reignition means a fire that was put out can come back. And it can come back later, without a second impact, because the energy is still in the pack.
Where the 50 feet comes from
The report attributes the figure to the manufacturer, not to itself. The full sentence, which matters because the attribution is inside it:
The engineers told NTSB investigators that they stressed the importance of leaving a 50-foot radius around the vehicle, as recommended by the manufacturer's emergency response guide.
And then, plainly:
Storing an electric vehicle with a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery inside the recommended 50-foot-radius clear area may be infeasible at tow or storage yards.
A 50-foot radius is a circle roughly 100 feet across, about 7,850 square feet for one car. On a tow lot that charges by the space, that is not a rounding error.
Read that second sentence carefully, because it is easy to stretch. The NTSB said keeping the clear area may be infeasible. That is a statement about whether yards can do it, not a measurement of whether they do. We have not seen a compliance survey and we are not asserting one.
What NTSB actually asked for
Safety Recommendation H-20-32 is addressed to electric vehicle manufacturers, and the report names them: BMW Group, BYD Motors, FCA Group, General Motors, Ford, Gillig, Honda, Hyundai, Karma Automotive, Kia, Mercedes-Benz USA, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, Nova Bus, Porsche Cars North America, Proterra, North American Subaru, Tesla, Toyota Motor North America, Van Hool, Volkswagen Group of America and Volvo Car Corporation. Not tow operators, insurers or repairers.
Model your emergency response guides on International Organization for Standardization standard 17840, as included in SAE International recommended practice J2990, and incorporate vehicle-specific information on (1) fighting high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires; (2) mitigating thermal runaway and the risk of high-voltage lithium-ion battery reignition; (3) mitigating the risks associated with stranded energy in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries, both during the initial emergency response and before moving a damaged electric vehicle from the scene; and (4) safely storing an electric vehicle that has a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery.
Point four is the storage point, and it asks manufacturers to write guidance. It does not impose a duty on whoever is currently holding your car.
The three ways this gets reported wrong
"There is a 50-foot law." Not in this document. The figure is a manufacturer recommendation recorded in an NTSB report, and the recommendation the NTSB issued alongside it asks manufacturers to publish better guidance. What we can say is what this report does and does not do. We have not surveyed state or local law, so we do not claim that no rule anywhere imposes a separation requirement on damaged-EV storage. See the note below.
"NTSB requires yards to isolate EVs." The storage recommendation is directed at the manufacturers named above, asking them to publish guidance. Nothing in it reaches a tow yard.
"The figure applies to every EV." The report attributes 50 feet to a specific manufacturer's emergency response guide. Guides differ. If you want the number for your car, the emergency response guide for your make and model is the document to ask for, and manufacturers publish them.
What you can actually do with this
Ask where the vehicle is, and ask it in writing. After a serious EV crash the vehicle usually goes to a tow yard before anyone decides whether it is repairable. That is the period this report is about, and it is the period nobody sends you a letter about.
Ask whether anyone has assessed the pack. Not whether it looks damaged. Whether the high-voltage battery has been evaluated, by whom, and against which manufacturer procedure.
Do not let the storage question ride on the claim question. How long a car sits is a storage-billing argument, and in most states it runs on tow and storage law rather than on insurance law. One state wrote a notice duty into its insurance code: see Hawaii's rule on stopping storage payments.
A repairable EV is a different conversation from a stored one. Once it is in a shop, what matters is the repair procedure and who is qualified to work near the pack, and that is covered in who is allowed to repair your EV after a crash.
What we could not verify, stated plainly
Whether any state or local rule imposes a separation requirement for storing a damaged EV. We did not run a fifty-state search for this page and we make no claim either way. Everything above is about one federal safety report and what it does and does not do.
Whether the 50-foot radius is observed in practice. The NTSB said it may be infeasible at tow or storage yards. Nobody, as far as we can find, has measured what yards actually do. "May be hard" and "is not happening" are different claims and only the first one is sourced here.
The recommendation is still open
Recommendation H-20-32 is recorded in CAROL, the NTSB's public case and recommendation database, as H-20-032. Its overall status is "Open - Acceptable Response", with no date closed, against investigation HWY19SP002. Read on 18 August 2026 against a database build date of 17 August 2026.
Open with an acceptable response means the NTSB considers the answers it has received acceptable and is waiting for the action to be completed. It does not mean the work is done.
A note on getting this, because it took a detour. The legacy CAROL interface at data.ntsb.gov renders an empty page: the application loads, creates a session and reports its database build date, but writes its content into shadow DOM and shows nothing. Its own banner points to a replacement, Enhanced CAROL at my.ntsb.gov, which works normally. If you have ever concluded that NTSB recommendation status is not publicly checkable, that is probably which of the two you landed on. Note also the numbering: CAROL formats the recommendation H-20-032, so a search for "H-20-32" returns nothing.
Correction, 18 August 2026
This page originally ran under the headline "The 50-Foot Rule for a Damaged EV Is Real, Is Not Law, and Probably Is Not Being Followed", and its opening said "Nobody is legally required to do either thing."
Two problems, both ours. The opening asserted a fact about all US law while a later section admitted we had not searched state or local law, which is a contradiction we should have caught before publishing. And "probably is not being followed" turned the NTSB's may be infeasible into a claim about actual compliance that we had no measurement for. The headline and the opening are corrected above, the unverified points are now stated as unverified, and one block quote that had been trimmed past its own attribution is restored to the full sentence.
Nothing in the underlying sourcing changed: every quotation was re-checked against the report on 18 August 2026 and all of them hold.
Sources
- NTSB Safety Report NTSB/SR-20/01, Safety Risks to Emergency Responders from Lithium-Ion Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles, adopted 13 November 2020. Read on 18 August 2026 from ntsb.gov. Every quotation above is from that report.
- Who is allowed to repair your EV after a crash
- Hawaii tells insurers to warn you before storage payments stop
- Will my car get a salvage title?
- When insurance will not pay for a proper repair
General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.
Where this fits
Each link says what it is for. We add one only when a reader on this page has a real reason to need that page next.
- Hawaii Wrote Down What Most States Leave to Argument: Notice Before Storage Payments Stop (the one state that wrote a notice duty into the storage argument)
- Will My Car Get a Salvage Title? (what happens to the vehicle after the yard, if it is written off)