Yeah, there's a chance VW are playing this to the market. As a commenter opined in another thread; new engines are rarely developed anyway and they stated that they will continue to iterate over current set of engines.

Note that there's no word about VW's EV plans besides this line "None of the executives specified a definite date for when they would exclusively produce electric vehicles".

There's also this line "Completely new engines were unlikely, he said.".

Seems like a planted PR piece by VW to further fuel the stock price momentum.