The Car in the add is definitely a 3D model. I’ve done a few of them myself. To simplify it down if you didn’t want to model the whole car and have a complete wireframe, you could create the car out of splines, make them renderable with a 100& self illumination map on. Maybe a couple of hours per car depending on the detail required.
If you do it Andrew’s way you can rotate the car if the footage is of a rotating car. (Excellent project BTW Andrew!! I love all your stuff!!)