WCX: Resilient Propulsion Strategies Require Options

April 14, 2026

Sebastian Blanco

From left: Ameya Joshi, CEO and founder of Mobility Notes LLC; Jack Dolan, vice president of product quality performance improvement at JD POWER; Mazen Hammoud, director of motion tech strategy at Ford; and Sherine Elakkad, vice president of electrified powertrain planning at Stellantis, speak at WCX 2026 in Detroit. (Sebastian Blanco)

Not every joke works in every location. This week, during an opening panel at SAE International’s WCX 2026, Ford’s director of motion tech strategy at Ford, Mazen Hammoud, started off with a joke. Hammoud thanked the moderator, Chris Atkinson, professor and director of the Advanced Mobility Initiative at Ohio State University, for the introduction, then he paused and said, “I love your engines.”

Sure, that’s kind of a groaner, but it also brought out some smiles, which was not exactly guaranteed as a session called “Engineering a resilient propulsion strategy in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.” Panelists discussed what our collective automotive future might look like in an industry where the powertrain of choice keeps changing these days.

Hybrids: bridge or destination?

Perhaps the best discussion came when Atkinson asked the panelists if they considered hybrids to be a bridge technology or a destination, and then how should OEMs allocate R and D funds across the existing ICE, hybrid, PHEV and EV technologies?

Sherine Elakkad, vice president of electrified powertrain planning at Stellantis, said the OEM can leverage HEV and PHEV volumes to drive costs down and use the transition time to engage customers. “Also,” she said, “we can buy up some time until the BEVs stabilize. So, it's great. It’s a transition, but it's needed. And it's not the final destination.”

Jack Dolan, vice president of product quality performance improvement at JD POWER, said customers learn a new efficiency number, miles per kWh, when they look into EVs, and they see the big range of performance among various EVs for this number. EVs are incredibly efficient, sure, but customers realize running costs are not just the cost of fuel. It’s also the cost of electricity, maintenance, and other factors that become clear the more experience the industry has with EVs. “You put all those things together. I guess my view would be that, for sure, it's a bridge,” he said. “Maybe it's an exceedingly long bridge. Maybe it's the longest one of all.”

Ford’s Hammoud stood on the other shore and took an opposing view. “I don't think hybrids are really a so-called bridge that you want to cross,” he said. “I know the destination is EVs, but hybrids – and the engines that come along with them – are going to be with us for a while, and innovation is needed in all these areas, driving the cost down of batteries, bringing out every last bit of efficiency from the electronics and the motors and on the engine side, there is still work to be done, too.”

Sparking ICE energy

Hammoud said the industry’s powertrain diversity efforts have pushed young engineers away from ICE work.

“During the shift from ICE to EV in the past three or four years, some companies lost expertise,” he said. “At Ford, we continued that development, but as an industry, you see, you saw the young engineers not wanting to work on engines anymore, because that's not where the future is. They wanted to work on EVs, and it became our job to make sure that that intellectual property expertise continues.”

Keeping ICE in the mix can also provide a hedge against supply chain issues, Elakkad said. When looking at different powertrains, the question she asks is which materials will keep the procurement department awake at night? “Scarcity of materials is not the issue here,” she said. “It's more the concentration of these materials in certain areas, and these areas and these countries take control of them. 70% of the processing of graphite last year was in

China. If we look at power electronics, for example, and rare earth magnets, 60% were mined in China and 90% of them were processed in China. It's really scary, because certain regions really hold all the main material for our components. How can we get away from that, or how can we work around it? We really need to push more for localization and get with the suppliers early and be part of the whole development.”