Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Sketchup, etc. Generally any non-parametric modelling software is acceptable. I personally use Blender.
Sketchup is known to not allow to control the mesh the right way indeed. I don't use it and i didn't investigate deeply, but from what i saw in some sketchup models they have a bunch of vertices for really tiny details. My Oldsmobile Regency was based on a model done in sketchup at first (though the creator sent me a 3DS file) but i had to rebuild all for a part because of the geometry not being good to be used in BeamNG. The other reason was that some aspects of the model were off comparing to the real car so it needed a rebuild but i had a good overall shape to begin with. So i really think modelling a car must be at least done in Blender as 3DS is an expensive software.
I can access 3DS for free, I'm a student and Autodesk gives free licenses of their software to students. Is that any better than Blender?
Oh sweet, that makes senses thought, good to read. I should become a student again i really don't know, but i think it's probably better. Gabester could tell you that better than me i think. What i understand is that 3DS has a special feature to manage the smoothing group that works better than the edge split from Blender, it includes this feature in the final DAE format, and that's why some of the official cars have broken smoothing groups when importing them to Blender. But for all the other tools i don't know, i used a bit the first 3DS max 16 years ago at my company so i don't remember. But basically i was telling that Blender should be the first step to car modelling, and not Sketchup from what i've seen.
