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Well, I'm not a promoter of steam powered cars, but on the other hand I am very interested in seeing what can be done to advance heat engines, which include not only steam, but hot air and other fluid types.
I don't want to whitewash anything, but I also think that compact steam engine technology did not advance the way internal combustion engine technology did in the last hundred years. Mainly for lack of funding and market. Oil was cheap and available and relatively easy to utilize, so why would it?
Gassification, since it was mentioned, creates ash and tar problems for internal combustion engines, and if those are removed from the gas by filtration before the engine, become another waste disposal problem.
External combustion engines don't care about ash, and the combustion can be better controlled to eliminate tar than the slow oxygen-poor smoulder of a gassifier.
I think you're probably right about some weight difference for external combustion, but that may not be a prohibitive factor, when you consider the number of intentionally overpowered and overweight internal combustion vehicles on the road today. There's no definite weight minimum for steam. There are even steam powered motorcycles.
Maybe I have a myopic view. I live in 67 acres of woods surrounded by hundreds of thousands of tons of free fuel I cannot use to power more than a woodstove. It replenishes itself faster than I or even six more households could cut each winter. Yet we buy refined fossil fuels just to get down a mountain to town.
So when I think about terms like "efficiency" I guess it depends on what one means by it. Would an engine burning 40 pounds of wood to take me down the mountain to town, let me do errands and necessary shopping and then bring me back, while providing at most, say, a measly 36 horsepower be considered less efficient than 8 pounds of gasoline providing up to 150 horsepower for a short time, capable of doing the same thing?
Well, to most, obviously yes, gas is technically more "efficient" than a solid fuel. But maybe there are other measures of efficiency if you're looking at a 5 cord woodpile from the trees all around you and thinking about the benefit of a self renewing home grown resource.
I think both views are legitimate. So, I'll probably keep thinking about how such a possibility could be improved over what has come before re. heat engines.
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