BMW Update - Rendering & Reflecting

I was doing a little bit research on texturing cars and I decided to do a few test renders on my BMW Roadster. Here are a few of them, which are compared to the original car.

Basically what I did was very simple. I assigned a mental ray car paint shader to the model and tweaked the shader a little to create a grey car. I turned on image-based lighting. Since I did not have a HDRI image, I used a jpeg instead and adjusted the color gain so that it would emit enough light. I added a directional light for some extra lighting. Finally, I turned on final gather and global illumination and rendered the image through mental ray.

Some close-ups:

I am going to start all over again. Even though a lot of time and effort was spent on this, there are many obvious flaws which are very difficult to correct at this stage. The first mistake I realised is that I jumped into details very quickly into the early stage of modeling. Maybe I was too excited to see the final result like most beginners. I did the edges too quickly and extruded the door sooner than expected to create that little bend. I should have blocked out the main body of the car first before adding too many edge loops to create the detail - which explains why the car looks dented at many points due to meddling around with the vertices. Secondly, I should have kept the car in separate pieces - the front part, the door, rear etc should have been separate pieces on their own so that I could create those panels perfectly without getting too much into extruding the faces to create those small ridges between each panel.

Nonetheless, I'm quite happy with the result here. I did get the edges where I wanted them to be. The only reason why I am starting all over is because I want to avoid these mistakes that I made and follow a proper workflow to create this car. After all, it's my favourite car and every effort should be put in to make it as perfect as possible! (=