I'm a final year industrial design student at University of South Australia. We use solidworks alot but i wouldn't recommend it for surfacing, which is what you'll have to do if your planning to model up a car.
The latest version of pro engineer has really good surfacing capabilities but is pretty tricky to use.
I would recommend looking into a program called Rhino. you can download demo versions (can only save 25 times) for free, and have really good rendering packages, Flamingo (photo-realistic) and penguin (cell animation style, very cool).