I agree I'm often very rigid, and even I know many users like Pilou, that never had get feeling well with Blender, but I help any user for every uses, when I can. Moi is great Nurbs application and for me you can make any kind of model, what other do with advanced surfaces modeller, we need only some working on it.

Anyway we can return on the topic of Ultra-efficient vehicle and it's rendering problem.

The most render engines follow the same rules PBR book (Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation) http://www.pbr-book.org/
and this rules is valid in the materials creation and lighting. Knowing those basics many seem the same. But the wall is for mostly users is shading and lighting where a new approach is rises out, but many guys are sharing a lot a free resources.
Below a link helpful for basic knowledge. The most easiest is Keyshot, and maybe C4D, but those are very expansive for only the rendering task. the others on market simpler is Maxwellrender, Indigo or Thea Render, but today are comings out a real-time engines and maybe is time to start learning those newest. starting with Twinmotion or others like Unreal a game engine that allow a rendering with modern GPU. and Many newer was software related

https://maxwellrender.com/

https://www.thearender.com/

https://indigorenderer.com/

https://home.otoy.com/ a bit hard but very powerful and limited to Nvidia GPUs

And the awesome but hard to use a standalone https://luxcorerender.org/

These are what I know I hope any can add more to this short list.