If the beam is reflected away it would do the same with any electromagnetic radiation. It's going to take some time to get all the dimensons right
As someone very familiar with raytracing, the goal with your design is to generate an essentially black object in your final image with zero or near to zero visibility using the rays projected from the eye point (or camera point depending on your rendering engine). Make sure to "spray" the rays from a single light point, no ambient and do it with a horizontal surface under the vehicle simulating the road surface. If you don't do this last item, rays that bounce up to hit the car would be negated and may be an additional source for a return path to the eyepoint. Also, make sure you put at least a portion of a bottom surface on the vehicle as there will be some interaction between the road surface and the gap between the road and the vehicle itself. I've seen anomalies appear in a rendered image when this part of the design isn't properly covered by a polygon or other surface type.
One thought... if you are familiar with radiosity raytracing, a "trick" you could use is to paint your 3D image an odd color like magenta and see if you get any magenta in the final image of the car. This _could_ simulate a doppler shift as I recall reading that radiosity works a lot like doppler ("colors" the return ray from the object if any"). I'll have to ask the senior developer of our rendering software this question.
In case you couldn't tell, I work for the vendor that sells MicroStation, the best darned computer aided engineering software on the market. We even have a patented rendering technology called Particle tracing that better simulates lighting sources than anything else on the planet... period.
--Mycroft
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