In today's internal combustion engines, the pistons turn a crankshaft, which is linked to a camshaft that opens and closes the valves, directing the flow of air and exhaust into and out of the cylinders. The new method would eliminate the mechanism linking the crankshaft to the camshaft, providing an independent control system for the valves.
It would take 30-40 years for this kind of modification to filter through the cars we have running. 4% of cars each year are new cars. It would take 10 years or longer for the modification to be introduced into most of the new cars. Old cars without the modification would have to be taken off of the road. Still improvements like this are a good thing.