Has it occured to anybody that you should be able to start your car with a dead battery, if you have to? A safe, relatively convenient, non-electric, manual method of starting the engine is possible.
Get rid of the battery-dependent computerized fuel injection, computerized ignition and electric fuel pump and it might be possible: Use mechanical fuel injection, an impulse magneto ignition, and mechanical fuel pump booster.
Then all you have to do is to crank the engine. There are several possible schemes for manually turning over the engine to start it. One very effective scheme would be to do it with the brake pedal. You would switch into a manual crank mode, then pump the pedal a few times to spin up a flywheel starter, then press the gas pedal to engage the starter to crank the engine. All it takes is one turn of the crankshaft to start an engine, believe it or not, that's how little kinetic energy need be stored by this unique mechanical starter. Using the brake pedal to pump a flywheel would take little effort; your grandma could do it.
Sooner or later, your battery will go dead and you won't have help. This option would come in handy when that happens. GM needs some innovations to stay ahead of Toyota, the worlds most fierce competitor. A manual start capability is only one of many such innovations which would set apart GM cars from the rest.