In the past year, the U.S. auto industry has reeled under market pressure, faced bankruptcy, accepted billions of dollars in government bailout money, and agreed to mandates for cleaner and more efficient vehicles. But for two brothers from Colorado with an automotive start-up company, things couldn’t be better.

Levi Tillemann-Dick, 28, and his brother Corban, 24, are carrying on a dream they hatched with their late father, Denver inventor and businessman Timber Dick, to bring to market a radical new engine design that is much more efficient than a traditional internal combustion engine.

The four-stroke engine used in gasoline-powered cars today was a breakthrough when pioneers like Nikolaus Otto and Gottlieb Daimler developed the design in the 1870s and 1880s. But its