"a new family of ICE" is not as confusing as you might think. Automotive engines have clearly defined generations and families of development. You can think of

"a new family of ICE" is not as confusing as you might think. Automotive engines have clearly defined generations and families of development. You can think of "new family of ICE" as the equivalent of processor instruction sets. A common "new family of instruction sets" would be something like the development of the AMD x86-64 64 bit instruction sets on top of the original 32 bit x86 set. A smaller "subfamily" or "development" can mean the addition of a new family of SIMD or something like AVX512, etc. However, the processor family is still an offshoot of x86 then x86-64, etc. In car automotive engines, it's exactly the same process. An ICE engine family can be in use for well over 20 years undergoing iterative improvements. VW will not continue to push the automotive equivalent of developing new instruction sets for the x64 processor. postmark: some examples of past "families of development" in internal combustion engines: carburator -> fuel injection; development of the supercharger and turbocharger, and making engines strong enough to withstand pressures from undergoing forced induction; hybridization - adding a battery to the drive train; etc All of these would be seen as major "ICE new families" - and for example in the VW and Audi world, you would see "families" of engines that would have, for example, a turbo on the engine in a particular model year, vs naturally aspirated only from the past model year car, etc. In VW, one major family is the VR6 - it's an innovation specific and proprietary to VW alone, and it's been around since 1991, and still in production - you see them still on new generation VW Atlas as a base engine option - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine - that's a 30 year run for an "engine family". The Bugatti Veyron uses 2 VR8 bolted together to make a W16 engine - this is the same VR engine family technology taken to the extreme edges of performance. VW will no longer develop another internal combustion engine family in the way they kick started the "VR6" project back in the 90's.