Abstract: Ceramic sensors are widely used in vehicles, trucks, buses and ships. Thermistors are required to monitor the temperature of engines to trigger coolers and/or water circulation. A combination of low atomic weight transition metal oxides allows for designing ceramic compounds with exponentially decreasing dependence of the electrical resistivity on the temperature. The challenges to the researcher on materials science are finding new ceramic materials with suitable values of resistivity/temperature ratios (high signal), wide operation temperature range, and high signal-to-noise ratio. Besides that, the challenge to the materials engineer is to produce large quantities of low cost, stable upon cycling and reproducible sensors, consisting of ceramic thermistors, electrodes, casing, terminal leads, etc.. Some routes to tackle these problems from both sides will be shown: how to produce ceramic materials with negative temperature coefficient behavior suitable to be used in automotive sensors and how to produce ceramic powders for manufacturing large quantities of pieces with the same electrical response dependence on the temperature of the engine. (CNEN, CNPq, FAPESP)