Well, I have seen that in the kseditor, to create something metallic, a reflector is used and then the car looks metallic, I have tried a streetlight but it does not look metallic, you have to put something in the ex_confi file.
specular is the simplest kind of "shiny", thats there for all shaders real reflections you get with ksPerPixelReflection shader or any other shader that has "fresnel..." properties of course you can combine both (look at other tracks/cars how they do it)
a nice normal-map (those blue-ish textures) also helps with better reflections, of course only with some shader that uses them
