Why of course there are. However who wants to spend hundreds of thousands for a car? Cars have to meet several "goals" - fuel efficiency, safety and the ability to sell on the open market. We already have a working, long range, long-lived battery system to go into an electric car. Its very safe, unfortunately the cost for the materials for the batteries would make each car around 1 million dollars (US) that is even considering mass production. The same "wall" is meet in high temp IC engines. There is a trade off between cost and efficiency. Consumers have been "trained" to buy a car and trade it in for a newer one. Cars are status symbols, that "must" be updated. Do you honestly believe that it is necessary to build so many brand new cars each year? There are already enough cars on the road to meet the need of every person in the USA. There are more that have been sent to the breakers before their time. Its not a matter of demand being a need, demand is based largely on "desire" for the "best". With that in mind auto manufactures must keep their product as cheap as possible as to create a long term market where folk will continually buy new cars, even though they are not needed.

The issue facing the ceramic engine is not the cost to the consumer necessarily because I remember in the 1980s when a near bare-bone IBM PC cost over ten times what fully loaded systems cost today. Of cause ceramic engines will cost more at first but the price will drop sharply ones the technology becomes commonplace and they have found cheaper ways to manufacture the components. The problem, apart from the technological obstacles it is facing, is the number of very powerful enemies. I heard of the ceramic engine for the first time at a meeting with some energy executives in 1996. They were concerned about what the new technology would do to their power generation business; their take on it was that the ceramic engine would be so efficient that it would be extremely more economical to have individual home power generation units. Their research showed that the ceramic engine would be very fuel efficient, have almost 0 emission, low noise and vibration, and durable. One of the biggest natural enemies of this technology is the oil and gas industry.