U.S. Says Samsung Battery Fires Show Weak Standards

Defects that caused Samsung Electronics Co.’s Note 7 phones to burst into flames last year revealed that the industry’s voluntary standards for the design and manufacture of rechargeable batteries aren’t adequate, a U.S. consumer-safety regulator has concluded.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which negotiated a recall of 1.9 million of the phones and is conducting its own investigation, said Jan. 24 in a press release that standards for lithium-ion batteries in mobile phones need to be updated.

Those standards were first developed in 2006 and haven’t been revised since 2011. The agency and Samsung are working with the industry to ...