Ask the average driver what they want from a car, and it isn’t 0-to-60-mile-per-hour times or Nürburgring lap records. It’s something quiet, comfortable, reliable, and inexpensive to run. On all those fronts, the electric vehicle (EV) already offers a better experience than a gasoline car. EVs are more responsive, easier to maintain, and aligned with everyone’s idea of a sustainable future. After all, no one pictures a futuristic city cloaked in exhaust fumes.
Yet mass adoption isn’t driven by enthusiasts—it’s driven by the everyday buyer. And for that buyer, EVs remain too costly. Global EV sales passed roughly 20 percent of new cars in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, but the inflection point for true mass adoption still lies ahead. Some major Western automakers are signaling caution: GM, for example, paused production of the Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq in December and will run only a single shift at its Spring Hill, Tenn., plant through early 2026—an acknowledgment of softer near-term U.S. demand and rising costs. Meanwhile, global BEV growth is being pulled forward by China. If demand worldwide is rising while Western manufacturers slow production, the industry may be entering a major shake-out. Automakers cannot sustain a multiyear cost disadvantage against Chinese competitors, and only a handful that close that gap will emerge as long-term winners. And closing it ultimately comes down to building far cheaper batteries. To reach true mass-market penetration, EVs must match internal-combustion cars on both range and affordability—roughly 400 miles for US $20,000 to $25,000. That’s a tall order, because batteries make up about 40 percent of an EV’s cost, and the cells themselves dominate that figure. BloombergNEF’s most recent battery-price survey found that cell manufacturing is now the single biggest determinant of whether a vehicle can be profitably priced for the mass market.
Where the cost lies
About 70 percent of an EV battery cell’s cost comes from materials—the cathodes and anode active materials, separators, and current collectors—and 30 percent from manufacturing, according to data from Thunder Said Energy, an Austin, Texas–based consultancy focused on energy technologies. Progress on both fronts is vital. Chemistries such as lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) and nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) are steadily improving in cost and performance, and researchers are exploring cheaper current-collector materials and boosting energy density with low-cost silicon-doped anodes. But even as materials evolve, the way we build cells has changed remarkably little.
Today’s “wet-coating” process still resembles how it was done decades ago: active powders mixed with toxic solvents, spread as slurries onto metal foil, and dried in industrial ovens the length of a football field. A 50-gigawatt-hour cell factory—enough for about a million EVs per year—can require 50 megawatts of continuous power just for those ovens, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of Power Sources. That’s equivalent to the electricity demand of roughly 40,000 homes, the U.S. Energy Information Administration notes. The environmental and capital costs are enormous.
Rethinking the factory floor
That’s why the industry’s attention is turning toward dry electrode manufacturing. In principle, eliminating solvents from electrode coating could cut both energy use and cost, while shrinking factory footprints. But getting dry coating to work at scale has proven extremely difficult. Without liquids, it’s hard to mix and spread the fine powders evenly, maintain strong adhesion, and avoid damaging the materials through heat and friction.
At Anaphite, my company (which is located in Bristol, England), we’ve spent nearly five years developing an alternative we call our Dry Coating Precursor (DCP) technology. We start with low-toxicity solvents to disperse materials uniformly, then remove the solvent mechanically before dry coating. The resulting film-forming powder behaves almost like kinetic sand: granular when loose, cohesive under pressure. During manufacturing, it transforms into a smooth, flexible electrode layer that bonds tightly to its current collector.
The payoff is dramatic—an 85 percent reduction in coating-process energy use, up to 40 percent lower cell-production cost, and a 15 percent smaller factory footprint, all without compromising yield or performance. These savings compound rapidly: percentage points shaved from cell cost can determine whether a vehicle remains niche or achieves true mass-market pricing.
A member of Anaphite’s Cells and Electrodes team prepares battery cells whose electrodes are made with the company’s proprietary Dry Coating Precursor for testing.Anaphite
Parallel paths toward the same goal
Anaphite is not alone in this pursuit. On a recent episode of the Volts podcast, Karl Littau, CTO of San Jose, Calif.–based Sakuù, described his company’s solvent-free “laser-printing” method, which he likens to “frosting a cake—without the mess.” Instead of wet slurries and ovens, Sakuù’s Kavian platform fuses dry powders directly onto foil with heat and pressure. Their approach can print electrodes of nearly any chemistry—LFP, NMC, or even formulations yet to be invented—by simply swapping material cartridges. In pilot programs, Sakuù reports that its process cuts carbon-dioxide emissions by about 55 percent, shrinks factory size by 60 percent, and slashes utility costs by more than half.
The machines themselves are modular and compact—“They could go in a garage,” Littau says—allowing manufacturers to scale production by adding units rather than constructing vast, energy-hungry facilities. While Anaphite and Sakuù take different engineering routes, the destination is the same: a low-cost, low-energy, high-throughput future for battery manufacturing.
Why It Matters
Dry coating unlocks other advantages as well. It enables thicker electrodes, which reduce the proportion of inactive materials and increase both gravimetric and volumetric energy density. The result: batteries that offer higher range per kilogram and per cubic centimeter. Combine that with EVs’ inherent benefits—quietness, smoothness, and low operating costs—and the case for electrification becomes irresistible.
Whether through DCP, Kavion, or the next breakthrough waiting in a lab somewhere, the dry-coating revolution promises to make clean mobility truly mainstream—bringing forward the day when buying an EV isn’t just the cleaner choice; it’s the obvious one.
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