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There are many cases of superior carburetors and fuel management systems being squashed by car and oil companies, who did not have the desire to have those impacts to their markets.
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Really? Having spent many years in powertrain engineering, I would be very interested in some details supporting that belief.
I have no personal knowledge about fuel economy technology being squashed from the turn of the century to the early 1970's, but after that I can't think of a reason either fuel or car companies would want to increase fuel consumption per vehicle. Fuel companies want to maximize profits, while investing as little as possible in exploration and extraction. Ideally, they want consumption to go down while price goes up.
For their part, car companies have had to deal with the Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements since 1975. I am personally and intimately familiar with hundreds of millions of dollars spent by car companies, trying increase their fleet average by a couple of tenths of MPG. My budgets alone have been in the tens of millions of dollars per year, and that's for just one small sliver of fuel economy and emissions optimization, for just one car company. I don't think they would have bothered to spend all that money if they had Double-Secret technology in the cupboard.
More than likely, you've heard popular myths like the Pogue carburetor, or maybe the lesser-known naphtha and water fuel system? A little thermodynamics will yield inconvenient truths about claims made for the Pogue carburetor, and many other fuel systems fall into the "well, it worked just fine in the lab" , category, but you wouldn't want one in your car.
I'll point out that there are lots of technologies that have been known for decades, but which didn't get into cars because there were less expensive ways to achieve the goals (like increased displacement instead of instead of turbochargers, just for one minor example). That's a different issue.
I truly hope someone is inventing a cold-fusion converter that runs on tap water. Our Earth desperately needs a magical clean energy source, but I've learned that it is not as easy to get better fuel economy as people think. The idea that technology is being suppressed is a conspiracy theory that could only be held by those who are not aware of what powertrain development engineers do, each and every day.