The increasing number of Li-ion batteries, especially in the automotive sector, leads to growing requirements for safety. One of the major safety aspects to be addressed is crash safety. Finite-element simulations of the battery are essential, to virtually address crash safety, however, for reliable use in the industry, some issues remain. One of these is bridging the huge differences in the length scales from the full battery pack to the thickness of single anode, cathode and separator layers within a battery cell. Another one is due to the large range of crash relevant velocities, as several experiments show a decisive influence of the loading velocity on the deformation and short circuit behavior (e.g. [1-3]). While advanced models, incorporating the complex inner structure of battery cells, offer detailed insights into the complex mechanical behavior (e.g. [4-6]), they often require extensive computational resources and time, which limits their practical usability. A pragmatic approach for a prismatic cell, basically following a homogenization of the cell interior, but using separator membrane layers for short circuit prediction, is demonstrated in [7]. The therein outlined partially homogenized LS-DYNA model of a prismatic cell is able to reproduce various deformation behaviors such as bending, crushing and punch indentation. Within this work, we present an advancement of that partially homogenized model, by incorporating a rate-dependency. The rate dependent model already used in [8] for simulating the mechanical behavior of a pouch cell, uses the Darcy-Forchheimer equation to describe the cell’s internal pore pressure. It is based on the assumption, that the flow of the electrolyte is the main reason for the experimentally observed rate dependent cell behavior. The proposed partially homogenized and rate-dependent prismatic cell model is validated against punch indentation tests, addressing the deformation prediction, short circuit assessment and rate dependent behavior.