At the start of the year, as Chinese carmakers drove battery-powered vehicles forward at an ever greater pace, the chair of Toyota was telling his executives, suppliers and engineers to go out and produce better internal combustion engines.

“We will keep the fire of the engine going,” Akio Toyoda said at an event in January, using his racing name Morizo. “I will never let all the work you’ve all done so far go to waste.”

Toyota has since developed a new generation of smaller engines with a unique design using shorter pistons that promises higher fuel efficiency when used alongside batteries in hybrid vehicles. The engines can run on diesel and petrol as well as carbon-neutral fuels such as hydrogen or so-called e-fuel.