The Tesla Engine?

Or maybe because it is April 1st.

Doesn't a spark plug create a plasma?

..." designed as a range extender, possibly eliminating the crankshaft and using the pistons to move magnets through coils."...

I hope they're planning to magnets that have a high Curie temperature. Conventional Nd magnets don't.

Why is the image in your OP of an engine having a crankshaft? This is totally different; the piston's restoring force is provided by a gas spring, not a crankshaft/flywheel combo.

I suspect the Tesla engine is april fool joke, the second picture is of a toyota engine prototype....haha....but an interesting concept....

The best April Fool's gags are right on the bleeding edge of plausibility. What they're describing in your OP is essentially little different in principle than a hybrid, which is very plausible (I drive one). It's a fine line, though, because if it's too plausible, then it falls on its face as a gag.

Whatya think about the ice linear generator? This would seem to me to be the perfect application of the opposing piston motors, or one piston that shoots back and forth with compression and ignition at each end...A supercharged 2 cycle....

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10310/473_read-6318/#/gallery/8873

I want a generator having no moving parts.

Hydrogen reactor....$100

That is some of the dumbest buzzword salad I have ever seen, with not a shred of engineering detail. Are you kidding, or are you effin' kidding?

Wow, this is a direct conversion I guess, no losses with angular displacement and what not. I wonder if this type of system already exist now.

Yep, they've been around since the 1940s. Follow the top link on SE's comment #8.

Wow, it can't be bad at efficiency 40~50%. Nice, we can have a more compact generators in the future by this.

I wonder if throttling the engine is still necessary for this design. Is it ideally efficient at low, moderate or high speed?

It wont even start unless you have this

No problem.

I like the more modern version of the Flux Capacitor. Be sure to check out all of the other fine products from KaleCoAuto!

The lack of bearings in this drawing is strange...

but then, Tesla was as much of a madman as a genius.

And maybe the same for the namesake company.

Did you see tha last paragraph in the linked article?

"Reached for comment, a Tesla spokesperson gave a brief statement to InsideEVs: “Our CEO hasn’t been himself lately, especially after spending so much time at Trump Tower. We can only assume that Musk has heard something in those meetings that he has not yet told the rest of us, and that’s why he has come up with this unusual idea, to add a gasoline range extender to our electric vehicles.” We’d be foolish to not investigate further."

Sounds like an ad for a "super spark plug" in a J C Whitney catalog in 1967.

April Fools!