This might be what Tomorrowland looked like to the eyes there to see it when it opened in 1955. Rooted firmly in the understandable, the things we’ve built on for decades, but at the same time new and different in delightfully unexpected ways. This is the future of the combustion engine, if it has one. This is the Infiniti VC-Turbo, the world’s first production variable compression automotive engine.

On the other hand, this might also be what Tomorrowland looks like today, to the eyes of us tomorrow-dwellers: a quaint but flawed conceptualization of an idealized but incomplete future that simply never materialized.

To me, it’s simply brilliant, regardless of whether it takes the industry by storm or sidles off into a corner of automotive anorakia. For the mechanically minded, it’s a shockingly simple and elegant solution to a complex problem—but one that relies on some incredibly complex engineering to achieve the production result. For the less mechanically minded, maybe start by staring at the video of the cutaway in operation for an hour or so.

Learn the full details on Infiniti’s radical new engine at Automobile Magazine.