It looks like a beautiful piece of engineering! I hope they are able to find a viable niche for it and push it to market!

I sure wish those animations would loop. I guess I'll just cross my fingers and hope the engine is eventually featured on animatedengines.com!

You can download from http://www.blogcdn.com/videos/www.autoblog.com/897.flv then play in a loop using VLC. (Though yes, looping without faffing about would be great.)

How can they call this a radically new type of engine when it is still ran on petrol / diesel ( ie fossil fuel )?

I remember hearing about this, and the problem was wear on the moving parts. The engine does not last long enough.

It's been done (better) 60years ago - look up 'Deltic'

As for new, this engine design goes well back to steam engines. Hardly new.

Yeah I was pretty sure I'd seen that concept somewhere before. It looks cool, but certainly not "different" enough from any other piston engine design to not have been conceived and tried by now. Thanks.

It seems like the difference is how the pistons are fired. There's no fuel lost when you spontaneously start and stop the pistons with electricity, so you can only run X at a time and get better fuel economy when you don't need all the available horsepower.

The fact that it's not so new is a big advantage. It can take advantage of industrial infrastructure and the economies of scale developed for existing piston engines.

A single crankshaft is probably more practical for small cars.

how is this different from a flat-twin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-twin

There are two opposing pistons in each cylinder. This enables the power of a 2-stroke engine, but without the horrible emissions and inefficiency normally inherent in a 2-stroke engine, and without the valvetrain complexity of a 4-stroke.