Can anyone point me in the direction of tuts for nice bright lighting maybe along the lines of HDRI ans how to use HDRI maps in carrara or make my own hdri lighting in carrara if that's possible ?!?!

The only tuts I really know of are marks - here:

http://www.vtc.com/products/Carrara-5-tutorials.htm

There is a section on lights - but I dont know if it covers hdri - if you go to his site:

http://www.markbremmer.com/pages/TutMain.html

And look on the right hand side there is a section about the dark arts - there is a car in the picture and I know he covers some of that in that tutorial but I don't know if its lighting per say.  It was way too advanced for me so I didn't watch the whole way through :/

Good luck finding what you need!

my technique is to pick one of the hdri scenes in the scene wizard on startup. then one of the menus on the right has the place where ya select and load a new hdri, of which there are several in carrara content files. the technique for making hdri is non-trivial. If ya search this forum, there are old threads giving links to software and/or images. AFAIK one way to make hdri is to buy a reflecting globe, set it in the environment of interest, then take dozens of photos of it, spaced at 1 or 2 EV. these photos are such that the most underexposed has no white pixels, and the most overexposed has no black pixels. in addition, it's necessary to move around the dome when taking the photos, that the software might delete yer reflection.