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I used the Reduce Polygon tool on each of the master cars. Then using the search feature, look for Camry.white Instance. Select all those and relink them to Cam.white Instance Reduced then deleted the hi-res version. Took a little effort, but man oh man, what a difference. The file scene file went from 700 MB to 70 MB. It now renders in 3 min. I didn't even have to touch the materials. Plus, I added all the cars to their own layer to make it easier to navigate. Here's the 95% finished image. Rendering a simple camera pan animating is now back on the table. Thanks to all for the tips. I'm using the Corona Render engine in case anyone cares.

angle_between_two_vectors.c4d

Yeah, rendering in sections of different groups of objects is my fail-safe, just extra steps. I opened one of the car models, the file is about 48 MB on the drive. I put it under the Reduce object and set it to 95%. Saved this scene out to its own file. This one is only 18 MB. That was before deleting the interior. Don't remember the polygon counts before and after. C4D is spinning right now. Might be crashed or just might be thinking. Not sure how long I'll wait before forcing it to quit. Before the spinning, I pasted the reduced poly car into my scene. I selected a bunch of Instance objects pointing the original hi-poly car and linked them to the lower poly. I then duped the red car, renamed to white and repeated the process. There are only 4 unique models, but 5 or 6 colors of each. I have a Mac Studio M2 Max I can connect to remotely and that thing can handle the viewport so much better. Just not the rendering. But alas, I locked that one up to and can't seem to reboot it remotely. Have to wait to see if anyone I trust will be in the office to physically reboot it. I attached a screen grab of the scene. Basically unchanged from this setup. As you can see. cars a very small.

Version 2 without the need of temporary polygon but it needs two matrix objects - one for projection, another to create matrixes on first matrix but after that unnecessary ones can be removed : Matrix_Cut_by_temporary_projection_plane_0001.c4d

This my copy-paste mail to friend from some days ago : "..... I'm very surprised how this engine was grown during this period especially compared to Octane development from last two years which is slow. They didn't implemented most of their advertised roadmap features. 1. As for quality I did many test using different scenes and I must say that I don't see differences. Even Redshift looks better for my taste. It looks more like Vray, Corona in the terms of light transporting to darker areas. I reported this 2 years ago on Octane forum with rendering examples of the same scene rendered in Octane and Corona. Octane needs much higher material brightness to achieve the same results but it create overexposure on areas directly lighting by Sun which needs tonemapping to avoid this. But pure bright material in Octane will always be much darker in indirect light areas than in Vray, Corona and Redshift too. Without denoiser Octane is much noiser than Redshift using rendering clamped to the same time for example 25seconds rendering Octane : Redshift : As you see Redshift is brighter in shadowed part and color transportation is more pronounced but you can lower this by using Redshift diffuse clamping by little : Such thing and many others are not possible in Octane because it is biased renderer. In unbiased like Redshift you have full control about many render engine aspect like light transportation, which object can be visible in reflection in others or even every material can have its own environment map. 2. It is great integrated with Cinema. Materials are correctly represented in OGL preview, fully suport for C4D modern node editor with all features. 3. It has three rendering modes fast progressive just like Octane but for preview because it always be little noise final bucket rendering - clear, insane fast especially if scene grows with many vegetation objects RT on beta stage but this is truly real time, noise free engine just like game. It is only for realtime previews but looks very close to final. 4. It has special sprite node that greatly improve speed of rendering planes with opacity masks like leaves, even better shading : RS ( zoomed ) : Octane ( zoomed ) : 5. Node system. Octane has maybe 3-4x more nodes but to be clear - most of them you never use because there is no need or they produce strange results. Redshift nodes are very well thought out, versatile. Even simple gradient node is more powerful. Mixing materials works like old Octane mix material where you can mix existing materials using material reference node and you can mix many of them. 6. Redshift doesn't have texture displacement which is Octane strongest feature. But it have very good optimized geometry displacement which works like Unreal nanite virtualized geometry system where intensity of geometry subdivision level depends on distance from camera and it can be cut-off on areas which camera don't see. You can freely mix displacements so for displaced asphalt you can add displaced crack decal without problem. Thanks to stacked materials, this decal can be easily put in object just after main material. In Octane truly geometry displacement is terrible slow because it subdivide all large surface with insane amount of polygons. I forgot about one important feature like Redshift Proxy. As you know proxies are insane fast to render especially in animation because they doesn't need preprocessing time and they are very light to interface. 100 hi res trees as proxies are still much better than 100 multi-instances even if their visibility is set to off. In Octane if you want to change proxy material like color, brightness, or texture you must open Octane Standalone and edit them here by "eye" because you use default Octane scene, lighting. In Redshift you can apply different materials to proxy and edit them inside main scene without the need to use external software and scene !