A battery thermal management system (BTMS) has become an essential part in battery-driven electric vehicles (EVs) in order to remove the generated heat from the battery which leads to enhanced performance. BTMSs have been implemented in EVs by adopting different technologies that include natural air cooling systems, forced air cooling systems, liquid cooling systems, and using heat pipes and fins. However, phase change material (PCM) embedded systems have gained a lot of attention due to their availability, low cost, and high sensible and latent heat in the field of BTMS. In the last two decades, thermoelectric coolers (TECs) have also been applied to BTMSs to make an active or semi-passive system with another cooling system. In this paper, a state of the science comprehensive literature review is presented on PCM (a passive system) and TEC (an active system) based BTMSs. A synthesis of the literature is presented in a tabular format to give a clear indication on the relative performances of the BTMSs. Moreover, limitations of the batteries, PCMs, and TECs are also discussed to identify the future research possibilities in the area of BTMS for EVs.