The reliable protection of personal safety and vehicle service security has aroused the rising attention on battery thermal safety issues. This poses ongoing challenges for battery thermal management (BTM) to improve the safety by constantly learning and adopting advanced technologies from thermal management to thermal safety control. On the basis of electrochemical, mechanical, and thermo-kinetic characteristics of battery behavior evolution under operational conditions of normal and abnormal, BTM with enhanced safety cannot only guarantee the battery operation performance but also improve thermo-safety behavior with the heat transfer intensifying method. Additionally, via effective measurements to detect and warn the battery behavior evolution characteristics, the combination of emergency cooling, fire extinguishing, and thermal barrier adopted in BTM with enhanced safety can effectively and sufficiently suppress battery thermal overheating and its propagation. As concluded, the synthesized integration of basic BTM and its safety-enhanced treatment can ensure the optimal working temperature range and prevent thermal overheating from propagation. Thus, the BTM system with enhanced safety has been a promising research priority. This article provides a comprehensive review on BTM with enhanced safety aiming to promote the battery application with high energy density, security, and cyclic stability served for electrification and intelligentization of automobiles. In addition, the summary of relevant research status and key technology is dedicated to improving BTM thermo-safe design innovation and collaborative optimization, to fit with the sustainable development needs of the long-term mechanism of energy conservation and green-energy vehicles marketization.