What could go wrong?

Hyundai already ships what this article touts.

"The new fuel delivery system has allowed the engineering team to bump the compression ratio from 10.5:1 up to 11.3:1."

Look at the Sonata specs. Non-turbo 200HP with 2.4L engine and 35MPG.

Delphi is way behind the international competition.

Rails are not much of the answer. It's too bad rails were put out of business and so many of them torn up, but they aren't coming back. Of course, we should take advantage of the rail rights-of-way that exist, and that can be part of the solution, but it can't be a very big part. We don't have the stomach to tear apart neighborhoods and cities to put the rails down afterward.

I believe the answer is the Jitney or Share Taxi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi). A large fleet of largish cars or smallish buses directed by a learning computer algorithm would be much more practical. You enter your destination via cell phone, the computer knows where you are, tells you where to go to meet a jitney and when to expect it. The jitney is told to pick up a few passengers at a few stops going in generally the same direction. Everyone gets where they're going in a reasonable time (much faster than transferring on a bus) and most of the time the jitneys are carrying at least two or three passengers, which is way ahead of the efficiency of a freeway with HOV lanes. You might transfer to larger vehicles for large distances, but the routes and rendezvous' would be timed rather than on a fixed schedule.

Note this is also a viable approach for using more of our airports to reduce the delays of the hub-and-spoke system.